Clearly buoyed by the response to his recent bulls**t about town planners, Cyril Ramaphosa this week produced one of the most spectacular bits of gaslighting we’ve seen in months, as he looked us straight in the eye and told us that stage 6 load-shedding is proof that the country is on the right track.
Of course, there’s an election next year, which means the weasel-words, half-truths and outright lies are going to fall like noxious little snowflakes, piling up in stinky drifts before they melt away and are forgotten. And, to be fair, this week’s effort wasn’t close to Ramaphosa’s best pre-election lie, when he threatened voters in Tsabela in 2021 that if they didn’t vote for the ANC, load-shedding caused by the ANC would become permanent.
On that occasion Ramaphosa was in great form, not only telling citizens “if you don’t vote for the ANC, then electricity may never be restored” but also scolding them for foolishly believing that the ANC should earn their vote by doing the bare minimum.
“This thing of ‘no electricity, no vote’ needs to stop now,” Ramaphosa said, all but wagging his finger, before finishing up by reminding the ingrates that even advanced economies had load-shedding, claiming that “in California, they had no electricity for months”.
Admittedly, 2021 was a particularly bad year for California’s electricity grid, as the state experienced a sharp uptick in power outages compared to previous years. But what Ramaphosa didn’t tell those voters, presumably because he didn’t respect them enough to tell them the truth, was that in 2021 the average Californian suffered power outages of — reader, do not scream — 5.4 hours. Not 5.4 hours per day, or per week, or even per month. That’s 5.4 hours in the whole of 2021.
We are obviously worried when there is load-shedding. But as we go through this process now, we must see it in a positive light because, in the long-term, these are things we have to do to say goodbye to load-shedding.
— President Cyril Ramaphosa
Yes, his 2021 lie about “months” of blackouts in California, and the results of voting out the ANC are right up there at the top of the pile, along with his 2015 whopper that “in another 18 months to two years, you will forget the challenges that we had with relation to power and energy and Eskom ever happened”.
Still, as I say, we’re about to enter an election year, and you can’t blame the man for trying. And, to be fair, his latest effort is definitely top-flight gaslight.
Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Ramaphosa explained that the current plunge into stage 6 load-shedding was because maintenance was being done, presumably because the Brics have all gone home and now we can stop pretending that we are an industrialising country.
“We are obviously worried when there is load-shedding,” said Ramaphosa. And fair enough. During load-shedding his generator makes a terrible noise and emits a terrible smell, making it very difficult to enjoy the string quartet and nightingale-egg canapés.
“But,” continued the president, “as we go through this process now, we must see it in a positive light because, in the long-term, these are things we have to do to say goodbye to load-shedding.”
See? It’s very simple. If you’re in hospital on a ventilator, and your criminally negligent doctors neglect you long enough for a dust-bunny to form in your air hose, and you’re starting to blackout from lack of oxygen, and then the doctors are finally alarmed by your gurgles, not because they’re worried for your health but because it might make them look bad, and they decide to unplug your hose so they can take the dust-bunny out, don’t be sad about those twenty or thirty seconds in which you are suffocating to death.
No, you must rather “see it in a positive light”, because once they’ve removed the blockage they caused, you can get back to receiving the lowest possible level of care.
Strap in, folks. It’s going to be a long election season ...
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