JUSTICE MALALA | Announcing a new minister is sad and a state of disaster even sadder

It is four days since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his plans to end the 15 years of electricity blackouts, and I just don’t understand how his new initiatives will work.

The president has appointed a minister of electricity. That new minister must work with the minister of energy Gwede Mantashe. He also has to work with the man who has direct oversight over Eskom, minister of public enterprises Pravin Gordhan. Then, because we have a state of disaster led by the brilliant minister of co-operative governance, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, this new minister will have to work with her too. Because this minister will be placed in the Presidency, he will be reporting to Ramaphosa as well. Then, because he will need money, this minister will have to go begging to the man who holds the purse strings, finance minister Enoch Godongwana.

Now imagine what the chairperson of the board of Eskom has to deal with over the next few weeks. This greenhorn minister of electricity will be demanding briefings from him. MPs have been tossing their toys out as well, demanding the board’s presence — and that of Eskom management — at their meetings. Mantashe wants to be heard, as does Gordhan and Godongwana.

I am sure the members of Ramaphosa’s just energy transition teams also want the Eskom board and management to give them a hearing. There is also the president’s national energy crisis committee, a body that’s also solving our electricity problem for us.

Seriously, who is running this thing? Instead of confronting the problem and dealing with it, Ramaphosa has merely thrown more bodies at it. As he has done in five years of governing (in which he has thrown powerless committees at many of the problems that have crossed his desk), he is bloating his cabinet even further with a job that at least six ministers are busy with right now.

Like so many other South Africans, I desperately want this new solution to work.

Like so many other South Africans, I desperately want this new solution to work. Sadly, it is clear it simply cannot. The ministry is already being downgraded into a “project management office” by the likes of Mantashe, who told the Sunday Times at the weekend: “To me, my understanding of this intervention from the president is that we must approach this issue as a project management intervention so that we project-manage the management of load-shedding.”

So what will the incoming Eskom CEO do?

This will be a ministry without any powers, without any infrastructure and likely to be without longevity. It will be something like the appointment of Sipho Nkosi — appointed last year to lead a team in Ramaphosa’s office to cut red tape across government — and of Daniel Mminele as energy transition finance task team head. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Over and above the creation of an electricity ministry on top of the many other committees and ministers working on load-shedding, there is something sadder: the declaration of a state of disaster. The declaration is an admission of failure. It is an admission that, 25 years after the Eskom crisis was brought before the cabinet in 1998, the ANC and its successive leaders have failed to resolve it using the ordinary tools of government that every administration in the world uses to provide electricity.

In the Government Gazette on Thursday, Dlamini-Zuma said the declaration of a state of disaster was meant to assist and protect the public, provide relief to the public, protect property, prevent or combat disruption, and deal with the destructive nature and other effects of the disaster. It is the job of government to do all these things. Why do we need to suspend our very fine constitutional laws to achieve what other governments achieve with regular, peacetime rules and regulations?

Instead of doing things in the light, we are shifting the building of electricity infrastructure and resolving these problems to the dark.

This is a dangerous step. Instead of doing things in the light, we are shifting the building of electricity infrastructure and resolving these problems to the dark. A national state of disaster gives government leaders the ability to bypass legislative steps. In one fell swoop, the protections we have built into our laws to combat corruption can be bypassed because the same people who collapsed the electricity system now tell us suspending the laws is the only way to fix the problem.

There is something debilitating about this government’s contortions on the electricity issue. So far it has been one useless initiative after another. The results are profoundly negative. For ordinary South Africans, things are getting worse. For domestic and international investors, SA looks like a country sliding into chaos.

Well-intentioned as Ramaphosa’s interventions on Thursday are, that they have clearly not been thought through means they will not give us the desired results. We will be in the dark for a while longer.