If you had told me five years ago that proud ANC minister Pravin Gordhan would write to right-wing Afrikaans movement Solidarity for assistance in finding high-level skills for Eskom, I would have warned you of the deleterious effects of cannabis on the senses. But such are the times. The ruling party, having mismanaged virtually all our national assets under state control and run the power utility company into the ground, now has the once Communist Party member on his knees scrambling to find the engineering and maintenance skills for this vital component of the national economy.
Last weekend I bought a book that I had been eyeing for some time (I seldom buy a book on first sight). I have long been fascinated by how post-war Germany was able to build the world’s fourth largest economy (Europe’s largest) out of the ruins and rubble of wartime defeat. In his prize-winning book, Aftermath: life in the fallout of the third Reich, Harald Jähner offers some interesting insights that I could not help comparing to our own aftermath of apartheid. Here’s a few.
Germany tried to forget the horrors of the Shoah; we still fight to remember. They are future-orientated, in other words; we constantly hark back to the past. The Germans regarded themselves as victims too after the devastation of Allied bombings that wiped out whole cities and of course their suffering at the hands of the Soviets; as black South Africans, we are the sole victims, whites the perpetual enemy. They worked as one with an almost obsessive mindset in rebuilding their nation from the clearing of the rubble (500 million cubic metres) to the mass production of VW Beetle (1 million by 1955).
Then this: except for senior officials in the Nazi Party and the Nazi-appointed leaders in prominent positions in all spheres of society, they retained the high-level skills that would rebuild the German economy; we had (and still pursue) a huge retrenchment of white skills (now also other African skills) under a sometimes-ruthless regime of “employment equity”. And, as they say in my second language, “kyk hoe lyk ons nou”.
I know these juxtapositions might sound too simple and that the mass extermination of Jewish humanity (and skills) cannot possibly bear comparison on moral grounds alone. Point taken. But it would be difficult to deny that elements of German culture, politics and values enabled them to do reconstruction and development (remember our RDP?) on a scale we could only dream about. Eskom has been demolished by a culture of corruption, political impotence and the gross loss of advanced skills such as power operators. One newspaper reported last month that Eskom lost a combined 13,000 years of skills when 500 skilled workers left the utility in three months this year.
On the back foot, and with a rising tide of public anger, the president, Gordhan and their government look hapless and desperate, flapping all over the place without any signs of tangible relief in the longest period of load-shedding in SA history. Restructuring and replacing the board is a symbolic act meant to appease public anger; it will not change anything because the solutions lie in politics, not governance; in the rapid recruitment and retention of high-level skills, not in playing musical chairs with ever-changing boards (ask the SOEs).
All of which raises a more fundamental question: why does SA take the skills question so lightly? Quite simply because the ruling party and its leaders do not appreciate at all the absolute necessity of high-level skills in building the economy across sectors. Ask yourself how on earth a failed mayor like Des van Rooyen could have been considered for minister of finance or a manifestly incompetent lawyer like Busisiwe Mkhwebane could possibly be appointed public protector; we are paying the price for the neglect of high-level skills in these important positions.
High-level skills, as in the field of electrical engineering, are not something you can obtain over a weekend. The logic of cadre deployment might well work for a car guard at Luthuli House but would be disastrous — as we now witness — for managing Eskom. High-level skills are acquired formally in post-school training in five or more years, then built through workplace experience over even longer periods of time.
Skills acquisition at the upper ends of the higher education and training system is complex, takes time and must be protected at all costs. This is where party interests take a back seat and where the interests of the country take precedence. Until the ANC grasps this simple point, expect to live in the dark for many years to come.
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