Having done some public speaking, I can only admire the composure it took for Cyril Ramaphosa to reassure the ANC’s national executive committee on the weekend that fossil fuels remain an integral part of Eskom’s future.
Even at the best of times that would have been a tough room, what with half of Ramaphosa’s audience snoring face-down in its quail pate and the other half sinisterly stroking a bald cat as it planned his destruction.
Given that already-fraught situation, imagine having a minor functionary hurry up to you, thrust a sweat-soaked ball of paper into your hand and whisper: “Gwede says read this right now or it’s back into the genital cuff!”
Imagine trying to remain calm and presidential as you carefully unrolled that soggy message and started to read the angry capitals scrawled across it ...
“Uh, Comrades, I can confirm that we have absolutely no plans to abandon Carol. Sorry, I mean ... Carl? Comrades, I’m struggling with this handwriting, and there’s some gravy across the part where ... Also, I’m pretty sure we have, in fact, abandoned Carl, so — oh wait! Coal! It’s coal! We have no plans to abandon coal!”
I’m exaggerating, of course. The instruction to reassure the NEC about the future of coal wasn’t handed to Ramaphosa on a soggy napkin: it would have been taken straight to his speechwriters, painted in crude oil on tablets carved from the skull of a whale.
For a moment, I found myself wondering why this message had to be delivered at all. Who, I wondered, could be so naive as to believe that SA was about to ditch coal altogether, and so anxious about it that they needed a whole president to deny it?
I tried to imagine what sort of weapons-grade Kool-Aid would be needed to convince Luthuli House that eco-terrorist liberals (imagine the blue people from Avatar, except driving Priuses to Woolies) were about to yank out SA’s entire grid and replace it with dream-catchers harnessing the breath of Gaia.
But then I remembered this is the ANC we’re talking about, and I understood how easy it would be to convince the NEC of more or less anything.
First, this is an organisation that has dedicated itself almost entirely to self-delusion. A senior member of the NEC need only stand up and announce that garlic and beetroot work better than antiretroviral medication, or that Robert Mugabe won fair and square, or that Schabir Shaik has only a few months left to live, or that nothing untoward is happening at Nkandla, or that the Guptas are just good friends, or that Ukraine forced Russia to invade it, and the cadres will nod like 80 plastic Elvises on the dashboard of a car banging over a Johannesburg pothole.
Stage 4 could be trouble. But going to stage 5 or 6 as the ANC dusts off those old, degraded promises will be more than even this numbed little country can take.
Second, given the evidence of the past 10 years or so, I’m not sure many NEC members actually know how electricity is generated. Indeed, I imagine it would be very easy to panic them simply by suggesting, perhaps in a WhatsApp group called The DA Wants To Put Your Baby In An Air Fryer, that without the magic electricity fairies that live in terrariums inside Uncle Gwede’s Turkish Karpower ships, South Africa could collapse tomorrow.
In other words, it’s entirely possible that one or two people in that audience were genuinely worried about the future of this country.
The rest, however, were worried about much more alarming futures: their own.
Everyone in that room understood one immutable fact: if there is regular, high-stage load-shedding in the months leading up to next year’s general election, the ANC is finished. The only question is how thoroughly we’ve been habituated. I doubt regular stage 2 load-shedding will change voters’ minds very much in those final months. Stage 4 could be trouble. But going to stage 5 or 6 as the ANC dusts off those old, degraded promises will be more than even this numbed little country can take.
Yes, it’s taken 15 years, but the ANC has finally found a reason to end or at least reduce load-shedding; perhaps the only thing that can still move such a calcified and degraded organisation: self-interest.
At long, long last, the party elite is starting to understand that not everybody is going to survive 2024. Oh, the ANC will still exist, perhaps even as part of the depressing coalitions that await us; but on Sunday, as Ramaphosa reassured his flock that he’d burn whatever it took to keep them in caviar — coal, diesel, even the lovely posters of Russian potato refineries donated by Sergei Lavrov last week — a large number of NEC members would have stolen glances at the people on either side of them and wondered: which one of us is going to have to get a real job in 2025?
The good news, though, is that there are 18 months in which they can prepare for the lean years; 18 months in which, Ramaphosa has essentially announced, it will be the patriotic duty of the ANC and its patronage network to do whatever it takes to keep the power stations running. The nation demands it. And demand requires supply; of coal; of different coal when that coal gets wet; of parts to replace the parts that replaced the parts that somehow cut themselves in half with a blowtorch ...
Yes, the furnaces might be spluttering, but it’s still gloriously warm inside the ANC.
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