PALI LEHOHLA | We are in a 'Madibuseng phenomenon' and the rise of the idiot is nigh

Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) carriages are too high, Eskom’s fleet is too old and irreparable and South Africans need a two-pot retirement savings system to get out of misery. This is the Madibuseng of our times, of this havoc-wreaking policy space in which politics and money and not engineers rule the engineering roost. We are in a “Madibuseng phenomenon” — yesterday you were orange, today you are green tomorrow you are red — this is ludicrous.

Eskom’s fleet is old and cannot generate electricity, the trains are too tall said Prasa and today the rail agency sees them differently, and South Africans are too desperate and a two-pot system is the way to go. This is how myopia in policy design has become entrenched in our policy space — the rise of the idiot is now nigh.

Artists create metaphorical conjectures that are useful to capture temporally and spatially complex realities and impacts. The general populace is granted licence to draw from the artist’s decomposition of complexity as forms of expression in daily and often painful livelihoods.

September in South Africa is a month of culture and we are afforded the opportunity to display our cultural heritage and embrace its evolution, which should be and is part of the consolidation of the democratic project.

In 2009 in their tribute to Lebo Mathosa, whose contribution to kwaito remains legendary, Trompies released a song called Madibuseng on the album Can’t Touch This. Mathosa was a young musician who died in October 2006 at the tender age of 29. In this song they say 'Madibuseng o ikentse roboto’, which translates to "Madibuseng has adopted a traffic light-like lifestyle". Sometimes she is green, sometimes she is red and sometimes she is orange.

Trompies' metaphorical prowess is portable. They could be singing about South Africa with its increasingly havoc-wreaking policy inventions. So precipitous is the havoc that the consequence is daylight robbery of the future of current and forthcoming generations. Call it the “Madibuseng phenomena” that Trompies regale us with in music but shed profound conceptions in policy-making terms.

The Madibuseng phenomenon is all around us but I have decided to write on three critical areas of convergence with unimaginable consequences. These are energy, transport and finance.

While the genesis of the “Madibuseng phenomenon” of these sectors has long been in the making, September marked the gestation period and their ultimate revelation to ourselves and to the world is nigh. Their convergence in September represents the policy gridlock of sometimes being red, sometimes being green and sometimes being orange, a representation of uncertainty of gigantic proportions. The unwelcome intruders in this, our month of culture, are finance, rail and energy. In classical Madibuseng style the two-pot system, The tall carriages and the old and irreparable Eskom power generation systems have visited our homes.

Let us start with the lies that responded to and surrounded energy. There is no debate that the planet is crying and the damage has done a disservice to current and future generations. Therefore, a reversal of this global condition is urgent. However, this should not be haphazard and should not punish those who had little to do with its creation. Our haphazard, uninformed and hapless entry into this discourse has backfired in rapid images that resemble Madibuseng’s robots.

Perhaps the Ukraine-Russia war that starved Europe of energy was a blessing in disguise. It unravelled South Africa’s most stupid policy stance and subsequent and equally disastrous actions on climate change. The policy was characterised by inducements which included the infamous $8.5bn (R150.96bn) loan, grant, call it what you may, and operational lies and another promise of even more billions. Our eyes got bigger than our stomachs as the lure of the dollar increased as we got closer to the signatures in Egypt. Eskom’s closure of Komati went ahead, without the promised impact study.

The Presidential Climate Advisory Group could only provide a crocodile tears explanation, not even an apology. This is the nature of impunity-based political decisions and none of the perpetrators is held accountable. In this solitary confinement of our deeds we deserve some comfort. We need not look far. We have to turn to the Industrial Revolution era driven by the scientifically barren internal combustion, in which 80% of the fuel does not turn heat to work but gets exhausted to the atmosphere.

French thermodynamics scientist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot died young and had not fully matured his theory of converting heat to work, but the politicians and the moneyed, like vultures to a rotting carcass, surrounded the technology and deployed it so massively to the detriment of the planet. So the reason the planet is burning is the Carnot Cycle deployment in cars, turbines and refrigeration. Electric cars are attractive as they mean there is a lot of mining of rare minerals and unless engineers and scientists lead the charge, politicians and the moneyed will always obfuscate through half-baked science and propaganda machinery to get their way through.

At the height of manufacturing the crisis of energy government was loud and led the charge that the Eskom fleet was old and not repairable. In this noisy space were many academics and business people. There was not one engineer worth their salt who had done duty at Eskom who supported this charade of lies.

Until 2017, both former president Jacob Zuma and his deputy assured South Africa and the world load-shedding was history. Of course it was history, only the hidden agenda undid it. The propaganda and countrywide economic sabotage were a noisy adventure of politicians and moneyed individuals who condemned Eskom as something that could not be repaired because the fleet was old. None of this mob had any knowledge of engineering. All engineers stood by the science of engineering. Mteto Nyati and Dan Marokane, both engineers, have acquitted other former Eskomites Matshela Koko and Jacob Maroga et al who held steady on the argument that machines can be repaired and are ageless.

As of today, we have had up to 166 days without load-shedding.In the six-year journey of being led by liars with no respect for science, people have suffered, businesses have collapsed and education has been undermined. Alas no-one is held to account for the lies that were thrown around.

In its report, Stats SA shows the increase in the use of gas by households during the six-year reign of terror. In its report FinMark shows 38% of small businesses had to buy generators to defray the costs of the lies and human-caused crisis. Yet the noise of government in supporting small businesses is drowned by its silence. Only 4% of the more than 3-million entities Finmark reported on from their sample survey had the imagined smell of the steak that government claims to be braaing for small business. Over the past 15 years the claim by the Small Enterprise Finance Agency (Sefa) is that they distributed R2.9bn among 700,000 businesses. On average each business only got R300 of support over that period. I always wondered where the R350 presidential ice cream parlour data came from. Sefa's R300 support to 700,000 businesses over 15 years possibly explains it.

Stats SA in its three surveys of employers and self-employed in unregistered businesses — 2005, 2011 and 2016 — have consistently revealed that small businesses have no government or banking support. This confirms Sega's R300 mystery support. Family, friends and fools by far are engaged in this survivalist environment. Expose it to load-shedding then you have killed it, so confirms the data, yet no-one is held accountable.

Out of the march to the Trojan Horse of greening the economy we move to tall trains of Prasa. Recently Prasa has asked the courts that they be allowed to use the tall trains. The only significant change that has happened in recent times in relation to the tall trains is the person alleged to have bought them is now an MP. Lucky Montana is in the legislature and has the privilege to hold the executive accountable and that possibly includes the tall trains. Prasa's board yesterday saw the trains to be too tall, but today they seem to say height does not matter. After all, when all is horizontal in the path of travel, height does not matter. Time wasted, resources wasted, children’s school wasted. No end of a havoc-wreaking government policy in sight as we enter the new phase.

Now that administered prices have spun out of control in energy and transport at the hands of government, a caring government has suddenly forgotten what the mission of a pension is. As Baroness Minouche Shafik puts it in her book “What we Owe Each Other,” in our productive life we work and put aside enough for retirement. Not in South Africa, because that which we have put aside has to help us pay the high prices of administered prices of electricity and transport. That has now given rise to the two-pot system. Pensions in developmental states and countries to the north are deployed as investible capital in infrastructure, health and education of society. Not in South Africa, where we have mismanaged ourselves so badly that this mission challenge has been reduced to sharing of groceries at Christmas stokvels. No child can refuse sweets — try it. Finance minister Enoch Godongwana has successfully played the sweet trick on the adult child of South Africa and he has succeeded.

In 1871 the census officer of the Cape Colony decided to enumerate the number of people in the colony but included who the idiots and lunatics are in society. He came out with 472 male idiots and 496 female idiots. In this period if the DA’s call for a census rerun is anything to go by, this should include a question on idiots. There is no doubt, and Google proves it, that the rise of the idiot is asymptotic and we therefore need to test ourselves on this scale.

Madibuseng indeed is green yesterday, red today and orange tomorrow.

• Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-gen of South Africa.