TOM EATON | I'm deliriously happy (but suspicious) that load-shedding has almost stopped

They say you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and the last thing I want is for the bony nag called Eskom to snap its rotten chompers shut on us and stumble away into the darkness again — but is anyone else finding the current relief from load-shedding slightly, er, odd?

I’ve read various sensible-sounding explanations for why there’s suddenly more electricity in our plugs than we know what to do with.

The utility has reportedly drastically reduced the amount of maintenance being done on the network, presumably dropping it from “Barely Adequate” to just above “ANC Running A Municipality”.

Winter storms have also apparently cranked out enough wind energy to plug all sort of temporary holes. (The two largest wind farms in the country, at Roggeveld and Loeriesfontein in the Western Cape, can produce roughly 15% of Koeberg’s output — not enough to keep Gwede Mantashe and his coal mining buddies up at night but certainly more than handy.)

Lower consumption has also helped, with large industrial consumers either going partially off grid or else reducing their consumption to avoid higher winter tariffs.

Finally, according to Eskom chair Mpho Makwara, quoted by Bloomberg, the situation has also been helped by a boost in morale, as plant managers now have direct access to senior executives thanks to a reshuffling of Eskom’s management structure.

I must admit that I find this last one a strange statement indeed. I mean, the crisis of the past few years wasn’t that we suddenly arrived at stage 6 grumpiness or stage 6 ennui. We got to stage 6 load-shedding, and we got there because things were catching fire or exploding or falling over or getting deliberately broken. I know a happy workforce is important, but citing morale almost seems to imply that when Eskom plant managers get gatvol they saw the legs off pylons and throw spanners into generation units.

Still, you’ll agree that, apart from the faint implication of violent sulks outlined above, all of these sound, if not reassuring or sustainable, then at least plausible.

And yet, at the risk of speculating wildly and irresponsibly, I can’t shake the feeling that something more Machiavellian lies at the heart of the sudden turnaround; a de-escalation so fast and dramatic that not even electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa saw it coming.

I can’t shake the feeling that something more Machiavellian lies at the heart of the sudden turnaround; a de-escalation so fast and dramatic that not even electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa saw it coming.

After all, just two months ago he grimly told the country: “I'll be brutally honest. It's going to be an exceptionally difficult winter ... at the current rate of trips and failures, it's going to be an exceptionally difficult winter.”

Insisting that Eskom would do “everything possible that we don’t go beyond stage 6,” Ramokgopa explained that “the biggest problem confronting us is the unreliability of the generation units. You can see that within less than 48 hours, we move from no load-shedding to stage 5.”

Now, we know that the ANC avoids two things like the plague: telling the truth, and offering gloomy prognoses of the future. Indeed, Ramokgopa himself started his tenure with a tour of power stations ravaged by mafias by telling us that Eskom’s problems were technical, not criminal.

It’s possible he was speaking “brutally honestly”, but most South Africans hearing an ANC minister tell them that winter was going to be “exceptionally difficult” and that he would try to avert stage 6 would have been forgiven for believing that winter was going to be absolutely hellish and that we were almost certainly going to stage 8 and beyond.

So what’s really happened?

For the record, I’d love it to be true that small, incremental improvements have made a slow but ultimately massive difference. That, after all, is how this country will be fixed: not with magic or radical innovations but simply by a lot of people quietly doing the jobs that were supposed to be done in the first place.

But I can’t help feeling that something fairly dramatic has happened, especially when I see how quietly two particular stories have slipped across our screens.

The first, appearing at the end of May, revealed that one of Ramokgopa’s first acts, after finally being given his executive powers by Cyril Ramaphosa, was to discuss security at Eskom plants with Bheki Cele and the president’s security adviser, Sydney Mufamadi.

The second, reported about a week later by City Press, claimed that a very senior Eskom executive was being investigated for being a kingpin in the ongoing sabotage racket.

All of which causes me to wonder: have certain embedded scumbags been rounded up, paid off or redeployed, very quietly so as not to give credence to the complaints and allegations of Andre “The Great Satan” de Ruyter? Is Ramokgopa using the political support that De Ruyter clearly didn’t have to actually — I can hardly bring myself to say it — remove dirty cadres from the teat?

Whatever the answer, the campaign of sabotage seems to have eased or stopped entirely.

There’s a part of me that wants to know why. But mostly I just want to switch on all the lights in my house and sit in the glare like it’s 1999.