TOM EATON | Forget about fixing Eskom, just create another one — that simple, right?

The ANC has often been accused of behaving in ways that are less than transparent, but let’s give credit where it’s due and concede Gwede Mantashe’s plan to create a second Eskom is about as transparent as it gets.

Of course, it’s possible I’m being cynical, so perhaps in the interest of fairness, I should admit that if you look at Mantashe’s proposal in very flattering lighting, say, by the glow of the candles we’ve been stockpiling since 2015, and ask someone to delicately tap a steel spike into that part of your brain where the memories of the past decade are stored, it is possible you will see an entirely sensible vision of a future in which a variety of power producers feed SA’s grid.

Hell, it’s even possible Cyril Ramaphosa is a good president, and that the UN official who emailed me today, addressing me as “Dear Beloved in Christ”, really is planning to transfer my $20m inheritance as soon as I send him a $200 clearing fee.

This, after all, is a world in which Zweli Mkhize cannot only show his face in public, but show it in public as part of his campaign to become president and then, standing on the still-smouldering ash-heap of state capture, tell a crowd that he shares “the pain we felt because of the abuse of Msholozi”. This is a world in which literally anything can happen.

Whether it will happen, however, is another story entirely, and I remain thoroughly unconvinced, not least because of one curious little digression by Ramaphosa.

“Eskom has been operating as a monopoly for over 100 years,” Ramaphosa told the SACP’s elective conference on Friday, “and having one company taking up the role of providing energy to the entire country poses a great risk.”

At first glance, this sounds entirely sensible. We do need a diversified network of power producers. Monopolies are unwieldy and encourage corruption. There is nothing controversial about any of this.

So why mention Eskom’s age?

Ramaphosa wasn’t implying that Eskom is bad because it’s 100 years old. Instead, he was implying that Eskom is bad because of where it came from 100 years ago.

Does a monopoly become more pernicious the longer it exists? And if this is the case, why can’t I find any statements from the ANC congratulating the Chinese government in 2016 for breaking up a state monopoly on the sale of table salt which had been in effect for 2,600 years?

The answer, I think, is less about age than provenance.

Ramaphosa wasn’t implying that Eskom is bad because it’s 100 years old. Instead, he was implying that Eskom is bad because of where it came from 100 years ago.

By invoking its age, he was firmly — and, I think, deliberately — reframing Eskom not as a modern utility left to rot by him and his useless colleagues but rather as an unholy thing rooted firmly in our colonial, white supremacist past; an object of deep pride to the apartheid regime, and therefore something irreparably tainted and certainly not worth rehabilitating.

All of which is why, when I hear the ANC calling for another Eskom, I don’t hear far-sighted pragmatists calling for more capacity. What I hear is the barkeep of history calling last rounds and the ANC getting ready to throw itself into one last, vast orgy of theft before it is dragged off the taps forever.

Harold Wilson was supposed to have said that a week is a long time in politics. There are anything between 80 and 120 weeks until we vote in 2024, an eternity by Wilson’s reckoning.

For those ANC ministers and MPs facing the end of their political careers, however, that is a terrifyingly short period of time in which to make sure you and your children are set up for life.

Even if the ANC clings on to a tiny majority in 2024, it will still lose something like 30 parliamentary seats. Each of those seats represents an entire ecosystem of patronage, like a dewdrop bursting with microscopic life. Shake those 30 dewdrops off the branch of government and that’s hundreds, if not thousands, of people facing radically altered circumstances.

In other words, even a miraculously good outcome for the party will still require industrial amounts of graft to happen if all the cadres are going to escape the ultimate ANC nightmare of having to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

Until the weekend, the pickings were desperately thin. Arts and culture minister Nathi Mthethwa had done his best, first proposing a R20m glow-in-the-dark flag before upping the ante only slightly by announcing a new symphony orchestra, which will cost taxpayers about R30m a year.