The decision to suspend load-shedding on Thursday to accommodate the funeral of King Goodwill Zwelithini probably felt like pragmatic politics to the senior ANC ministers who made the call to Eskom. But for the enemies of Cyril Ramaphosa, it was a gift straight from the gods.
To be fair to Ramaphosa, it’s not as if he had much of a choice. For millions of South Africans, the late monarch was a respected and admired figurehead whose memorial was an event of national, and perhaps even international, importance.
For these people, being deprived of seeing or listening to the service would have felt either like a tragic loss or, to some, a grievous – and possibly deliberate – injury.
As someone who was intimately involved in the talks ahead of SA’s first democratic election, Ramaphosa must still wake up sweating from time to time, remembering those anxious days in March 1994 when the king called on Zulus to “fulfil their sacred duty” to defend Zulu sovereignty “at all costs” by boycotting the election.
It was reckless and potentially catastrophic, but it worked: King Zwelithini got the assurances and concessions he was seeking and agreed to back the election.
The king’s brinkmanship, however, left an indelible mark on the ANC, and every administration since 1994 has gone to great lengths not to get on the wrong side of Zulu nationalism and its figureheads.
In this context, spending R40m to burn diesel for four hours on Thursday was a very small price to pay.
And yet the decision might have cost Ramaphosa in another, fairly absurd, way.
To understand why, you need to spend as much time on social media as I do, tumbling down those dingy rabbit holes in which supporters and paid shills of the Radical Economic Transformation faction fabricate and disseminate what analysts are now calling “talking points” but what you and I call conspiracy theory or propaganda.
As you might expect from a group that includes fantasists like Carl Niehaus, there’s a lot of fairly wacky stuff being pumped onto the internet and into pro-Zuma brains.
As you might expect from a group that includes fantasists such as Carl Niehaus, there’s a lot of fairly wacky stuff being pumped onto the internet and into pro-Zuma brains. But one of the strangest, and yet most persistent, is the conspiracy theory that load-shedding isn’t real.
The argument, if we can call it that, requires Trumpian resistance to facts, but the nub of the RET gist is as follows.
When Jacob Zuma was president, there was no load-shedding. (Yes, I know, but bear with me.)
There was no load-shedding because Eskom supplied more than enough electricity, thanks to geniuses such as Brian Molefe. (Yup.)
There is no technical reason why Eskom should be supplying less electricity under Cyril Ramaphosa.
Therefore the only logical explanation is that Eskom is switching off the grid as part of a shadowy scheme involving Ramaphosa, “White Monopoly Capital”, and all sorts of other bogeymen who want to cripple the SA economy in a kind of scorched earth campaign to make sure everyone is too frightened and poor to embrace the glorious leadership of Ace Magashule, Duduzane Zuma and Carl Niehaus.
In short, this theory, which has gained enormous traction among the RET faction, insists that load-shedding is not a crisis response to limited capacity but is instead entirely optional.
And on Thursday, when Eskom cancelled the scheduled stage two blackout to allow the memorial service to be broadcast and then resumed at stage two immediately afterwards, every one of those RET conspiracy theorists nodded knowingly and said: “Told you.”
Then again, it’s not like they need evidence to believe what they do. But when Ramaphosa got home from the memorial on Thursday afternoon, he would have been forgiven for ruefully remembering the old saying that no good (or politically necessary) deed goes unpunished.
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