Try, if it amuses you, to imagine what President Cyril Ramaphosa's stomach did when an aide whispered to him on Monday that Eskom was going into stage 4 loadshedding. Or what his heart rate did. Or the swear word he repeated.
The shock would have been total, the jelly in the knees severe. He's a decent guy and he's sucked up enough bad news in an action-packed life, but the imminent and total collapse of all economic activity in the country he rules would have eclipsed just about everything else for sheer terror.
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To an extent it's his own fault. Ramaphosa is famously distracted. Like many people his age (I am his age) he verges on attention deficit disorder. When he was in business he was so busy doing deals and politics and saving the world, he developed a reputation for leaving all his many board meetings early. "I do apologise Mr Chairman but may I please be excused I have to rush to ." whatever. I saw him do it more than once to a board I used to be invited to now and then. The big apologetic smile. How could you refuse?
It was Brian Joffe at Bidvest, they say, who made him stop. You're either on the board or you're not, was the message.
Ramaphosa needs a Joffe now to (metaphorically) slap him around a little and get him to really focus. It is impossible to exaggerate the technical and financial trouble Eskom is in. And at least we can count the debt. We can't count the bad welds, the leaks, the rusting, cheap Chinese spares that Eskom engineers have been reduced to buying to keep its "fleet" of coal power stations going.
It's that slow creep that's got Eskom. The unions, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and metalworkers' union Numsa, can cry foul at the government's excellent plan to split the company into generation, transmission and distribution businesses, and threaten strikes and, no doubt, lots of violence. But can any one of their number walk in to one of the units that failed last Monday and fix it themselves?
It is all hubris. I remember Ramaphosa visiting Eskom soon after he became deputy leader of the ANC. This would have been around 2013 or 2014. He stepped out of his car, was greeted by the usual obsequious officials and turned to the cameras to proclaim his joy at being able to visit this "glorious" institution.
But by that time the death of the Eskom he thought was so "glorious" was already inevitable. It had been white-anted by years of post-apartheid conceit and a loss of (mainly white) skills and experience. That fact that the building and power stations still stood proud was mistaken for function. But by then it was little more than form.
I wonder, where were the unions - who threaten Ramaphosa now that he has been confronted by the truth of the transformation of Eskom - when the white-anting began? Where were they when it became clear to Numsa (they are metalworkers, after all) that construction faults at the two mega Eskom projects, Medupi and Kusile, could not be reversed? That the welds that Hitachi and the ANC funding vehicle Chancellor House had done on Medupi's boilers were rotten?
Where were the unions as Eskom's staff began to expand rapidly while the volume of electricity it produces started to fall? Can they not count? Were they not alarmed? Did they raise a hand? Where were the unions when Glencore was forced off its Optimum mine so it could be given, literally for free, to the Gupta family? Were there pickets at the Optimum gates to stop the Guptas getting in?
Where were the unions now threatening Ramaphosa and the rest of us with darkness and violence when Brian Molefe returned to Eskom as its CEO for the second time? I'll tell you. They were there in the building, hundreds of workers, ululating and cheering the man who, though they still couldn't see it, was bringing Eskom to its knees.
But those days are gone and workers must be careful who they listen to. Ramaphosa has learnt some painful lessons but it is not clear that the leadership at Numsa and the NUM have. They sound increasingly like mouthpieces for the coal industry.
The unions are lucky that Ramaphosa, one of their own, is president now. Splitting up Eskom could potentially create even more jobs than it destroys. The state will have to help retrain people and get them renewables-ready. Hell, if I were a union leader today I'd be demanding my investment arm start renewables projects of its own. And what's more, we could manufacture it all right here in SA. Every. Single. Component.
No complicated welding required...