TOM EATON | Where does De Lille think electricity comes from?

This week Patricia “De Fence” De Lille said load-shedding was like “when you have a drought situation”, and now I understand much, much more about the omnishambles we find ourselves in.

Speaking to eNCA on Tuesday, De Lille explained that her ministry was trying to find ways to “drive down demand” for electricity, which explains her government’s strategy of closing down businesses and encouraging wealthy people to emigrate.

Indeed, said De Lille, it was important not only for the government to drive down demand but for all of us to do it too, presumably because, as we all know, the best way to grow an economy and pull people out of poverty is for fewer and fewer people to use electricity and instead cook their food and power their homes and businesses by burning things like whale-oil, wood and textbooks.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly revealing about this. The ANC government has made it extremely clear it has no idea what an economy is or how to grow one.

It is like when you have a drought situation and you have a limited amount of water. Here we have a limited amount of electricity.

—  Patricia de Lille

But where things suddenly started making a lot more sense was when De Lille tried to explain why we all should be trying to use less electricity.

“It is like when you have a drought situation and you have a limited amount of water,” she explained. “Here we have a limited amount of electricity.”

Now, at this point I should stress that De Lille is not the worst minister in Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet. Compared with Bheki Cele or Fikile Mbalula, for example, she is a dazzling intellectual blessed with supreme administrative and interpersonal skills.

It does, however, require one to be either exceptionally stupid or supremely contemptuous of the public’s intelligence to suggest, as De Lille did, that the systemic neglect, corruption and sabotage at Eskom, carried out mostly by cronies of her government, is a natural phenomenon like rainfall.

No doubt she and her handlers would explain that it was just a turn of phrase; that she wasn’t literally trying to say load-shedding is the same as a drought.

Then again, sometimes the simplest way of understanding why people act as they do is simply to listen to what they say when their guard is down. And what De Lille said is more of what the ANC has been telling us ever since it started trying to distance itself from the collapse of Eskom.

What she said, whether she meant to or not, is that the electricity supply is beyond human control; and because it is beyond human control, we tiny humans must simply make do with what nature gives us: a gradually shrinking pie, which we must cut into ever smaller pieces.

We cannot make the pie bigger, because pie-making is for the gods alone. Humans simply don’t know how to make them.

No. All we can do is look up into the sky, from whence comes pies and rain and electricity, and pray that somehow something happens, and it all works out.