Six months after President Cyril Ramaphosa unveiled his energy plan and set up the national energy crisis committee (Necom) to stabilise the grid and end load-shedding, SA is worse off than before.
Stage 6 is now a regular occurrence, with power cuts of up to 12 hours a day a grim reality for many South Africans. And experts are increasingly talking of stage 10 and beyond.
Never before has the spectre of a failed state loomed so large. And never before has government appeared more paralysed, overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with the crisis.
Ramaphosa is said to have cancelled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, because of SA’s power crisis. But he seems to have little to show for it, other than a few meetings that, from what has been reported, have yielded nothing new.
On Wednesday director-general in the presidency Phindile Baleni, who heads up Necom, admitted bureaucracy was making it difficult for the government to respond in an “agile manner” to the energy crisis.
She then waxed lyrical about advances that had been made since the committee was set up last July.
These include working with Eskom to provide support to improve plant reliability and amending regulations to remove the licensing requirement for private generation projects.
She said an additional 300MW had been imported through the Southern African Power Pool and negotiations were under way to secure a potential 1,000MW from neighbouring countries starting this year.
If so many advances have been made, why has there been such a marked deterioration in power supply? There has been no further stabilisation of the grid, no reduction of load-shedding, no bounce-back for small businesses.
But wait, there’s more. Baleni said work had been done to cut red tape and streamline regulatory processes, including reducing the timeframe for environmental authorisations to 57 days from more than 100.
She added the committee had reduced the registration of new projects from four months to three weeks and was working to ensure grid connection approvals are provided within six months.
Her words may have impressed anyone living under a rock for the past few years, but they left most South Africans stone cold. Our government is playing us like a fiddle, regurgitating the same tired old lines we’ve heard before.
If so many advances have been made, why has there been such a marked deterioration in power supply? There has been no further stabilisation of the grid, no reduction of load-shedding, no bounce-back for small businesses. Quite the opposite, we have regressed.
Long-suffering South Africans have heard it all before. We don’t want talk, we need action.
While we recognise that Necom has made some progress, its victories can be likened to a soccer team scoring two goals but conceding 20. That is a loss in anyone’s book. No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, there is no disguising those porcine features.
Last week, mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe boldly claimed that Eskom could be fixed within the next six to 12 months but declined to tell us how.
He told eNCA: “Eskom must do introspection. Do we have the capacity, technically, to deal with the crisis? If not, can we go out and look for that capacity? If we don’t do that, it will be a very complex problem.
“It will take us six to 12 months to sort the issue if we pay attention to the issue.”
But finance minister Enoch Godongwana said on the sidelines of WEF on Monday that SA has a plan to improve energy provision that will end the need for any power cuts within the next 12-18 months.
“Eventually in the next 12-18 months we will be able to say load-shedding is a thing of the past. That is the target,” he said.
So even the ruling party doesn’t seem to be on the same page. What confidence can we have in an incoherent government? And what guarantees do we have? We have been given a multitude of dates and deadlines over the years, none of which has been met.
The population’s patience has finally run out and agitation is reaching boiling point. Government is running out of time and needs to pull an enormous rabbit out of its hat if it has any chance of holding on to power in next year’s national elections.
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