In early 2010, I was assigned to advise Iraq on the feasibility of undertaking a census. The rolling blackouts in SA and the accompanying spin doctoring resemble the tragic drama of the “Mother of all Wars”.
I witnessed the tragedy of the destruction of Iraq and its rich, ancient Mesopotamian culture and history. It was in-your-face and heart-wrenching.
The height of my trip, despite the destruction tragedy, was going to Nejaf, a journey of 120km from Baghdad. I experienced going into a mosque for the first time in my life. Given my Christian upbringing, I recalled Psalm 137, the Song of Exile — the River of Babylon. Into Shāhīn Mosque, one of the oldest mosques in Najaf, located on the northern side of the court of Imam Ali’s shrine, I went. I then asked how I pray in a mosque as a Christian. The Imam said pray to your God anyhow.
That reminded me of our Constitutional dispensation that also says pray anyhow and thus enshrines basic freedoms. But how can you sing the Lord songs in the strange land of ongoing tragedy at Eskom, which has become comical and entertaining only if it was not tragic, is the question? With the Zondo report now out, the genesis of tragic proportions at Eskom is magnified and lightened by the nationwide no-end-in-sight darkness.
This is where the comical part of the tragedy begins, especially as the globe is heading and reverting to the black rock for energy requirements, given the Russia-Ukraine war.
The showdown in parliament between the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) and the Eskom board, or dare I say a certain board member, Busi Mavuso, albeit in reality a side show, triggered what was ironically to become the “Mother of all Wars” from whence the “infidels would be slaughtered or the weapons of mass destruction” were going to be discovered and destroyed. None of the two outcomes happened and this is the entertainment as this comedy of errors began to unfold.
With the current trajectory, a sure wasteland SA is in the making. After being dressed down by the chair of the committee, Mkhuleko Hlengwa, and her storming out of the meeting, a hurriedly prepared statement by the ANC caucus at Scopa and by the minister condemning Mavuso’s behaviour was issued.
The drama was supposed to have reached its zenith point with Mavuso summarily dismissed or forced to resign. None of that happened and the plot was yet to unfold and reach a climax.
Like a mother hen caring for its chickens in the face of a swooping hawk, Mavuso stuck to her guns.
In an interview with Power FM, her determined defiance was palpable. She drew deep and went for domestic parallels. She said she is not a little girl and even her 13-year-old son does not receive the kind of treatment she got from Scopa and the threatening letters that followed the encounter.
She had stuck her spear in the ground and drawn a line in the sand, ready for a fight. Her stand was emboldened. Within 48-hours the heroic chair of Scopa was summoned by his party, the IFP, and instructed to apologise to Mavuso, turning her into the Manthatisi of our times.
Queen Manthatisi of the Batlokoa was a fierce warrior who led men to protect the Tlokwa people in the 1800s during the Lifaqane.
The cat was set amongst the pigeons. The discordance and drama had been set in motion.
The Scopa had also argued that Mavuso made a correct point, albeit in a wrong meeting. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, SA quipped. Like the war of lies that turned Iraq into a wasteland, two decades later Eskom has been run into a wasteland while a plethora of interventions, chief among them dividing Eskom into three, rages on and on.
In 2003 when the US caused an invasion on Iraq for production of weapons of mass destruction, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared “the Mother of All Wars” hadstarted.
His declaration was given wind by his skillful master spinner and foreign affairs minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who bigger than the war itself. He became the legendary comical Ali. His masterpiece was his announcement that the “infidels were being slaughtered”, and this statement was made in full sight of fleeing Iraqi soldiers.
Two lies lay diametrically opposed in this tragedy that destroyed Iraq. The first caricature was the Blair-Bush (former UK prime minister Tony Blair and former US president George Bush) lie that insisted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The second lie was that the “the infidels” were being “slaughtered”.
The contestation to the Blair-Bush lie was an authoritative report by the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who reported “after a three-months mission of intrusive inspections, the agency had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.
We are at stage 8 load-shedding in terms of the impact of this comical tragedy on the economy
“There was also no indication Iraq had attempted to import uranium since 1990 or had attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment”.
The lie by comical Ali was very entertaining, if only the war was not so tragic. It was not about the butchering of the infidels but about his own demise by suicide. This was denied by Centcom and Pentagon officials who said “they have no confirmation al-Sahhaf is dead and say reports of his demise, to paraphrase Mark Twain, may have been greatly exaggerated”.
Getting back to the tragic comedy at Eskom, the contestation has become one that says we are a long way from stage 8 load-shedding because between stage 2 and stage 8 there are 6 stages we have to go through and a call for a national disaster on energy is uncalled for.
This is where our comical Ali caricature comes in. What public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, a man from whom I will take nothing for not only building a state-of-the-art revenue service but also for standing up alone over a protracted period against state capture when such was not fashionable, is certainly faltering badly in his arguments that inevitably underestimate the stage 2 effects of load-shedding on the economy.
We are at stage 8 load-shedding in terms of the impact of this comical tragedy on the economy. His message has been echoed by Eskom spin doctors about how far stage 8 is from stage 2. The prognosis is that the economy at stage 2 is not as hurt as is would be at stage 8. What a comical tragedy of thought.
The problem is this: in pursuing an equal-misery strategy in a system that is integrated, the misery to one at any given time is a misery to all. The effects are therefore not proportional to the numerical gap between two and eight, they are exponential. One broken telephone connection link against many open connections transforms into a many-to-one equation of broken connection.
There will be no business in the one-to-many as there will not be in the many-to-one. An adoption of an equal-misery maximisation strategy implies all those connected to an immiserised unit of the economy are immiserised at any point in time that one element is immiserised.
Let us take an example of a Zoom call connecting people in different cities in SA during a geographically phased-in load-shedding from 5pm to 10pm.
For those who were supposed to be in that Zoom call for five hours will not be in that Zoom call because the members will never form a quorum.
Each has to entertain their two hours of darkness. The load-shedding imposes mutual exclusivity of operations that are designed for mutual connectivity and hence transforms stage 2 load-shedding to a multiple stage of load-shedding, defined by all those who should have been connected. That renders joint operations across space to a level even higher than level 8 load-shedding.
Add to all that an education system that does not work, a policing regime that is failing, a water system that does not work, a road network full of potholes and a rail systems ripped off every day in full glare of authorities and citizens. If that does not define a state of disaster then I have to search for definitions from comical Ali.
Citizens and the economy are reeling at a stage far beyond level 8. Check the numbers. Mining, despite the price boom in minerals, has volumes of mineral production well below par, according to a StatsSA release on May 11. Why is that so? Because of electricity.
No amount of comical Ali kind of spin or Blair-Bush nexus saved Iraq from being a wasteland, and none of that kind regarding levels of load-shedding, letters to Mavuso or splitting Eskom into three will save SA from being a wasteland.
The world is heading to the black rock for energy cover. We should do the same and abandon this debilitating spin doctoring.
Mavuso’s war for privatisation of state-owned enterprises as a remedy for failed government execution will prove her victory at Scopa as a pyrrhic stunt. It is time we looked into the dental composition of the $8bn energy transition gift horse from the world rushing to the black rock. The gift horse may turn out to be the real Trojan Horse.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg and the former statistician-general of SA.
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