In the dark about policy
- Reposted: Let’s try this again. For some reason, an old version of this got posted first time around.
This SA Press Association story was picked up by the Independent Online:
ANC conference left in the dark
Debates at the ANC policy conference in Midrand were on Thursday being held in the dark after a power failure.
A security guard at Gallagher Estate said that generators were powering electricity in one area of the venue. However on the other side delegates discussed policy matters in the dark.
A shopping centre across the street had electricity and so did the garage on the corner. - Sapa
I’m thinking here’s a profit opportunity. Not just in selling them gas lamps, but in betting against all those who wouldn’t have the nous to profit from the needy bureaucrats.
After all, they are the people who keep believing the politicians when they say government service delivery is a good idea. They believe the very people who sit in the dark claiming there’s no crisis, while thousands of businesses lose millions because of frequent, large-scale and prolonged power failures. That belief is false, and from false beliefs, money can be made.
Engineers warned more than ten years ago that South Africa was heading for an electricity supply crunch, and would have to invest early because power stations are complex projects that take many years to come onstream. The electricity sector’s contribution to GDP has halved from 1990 to 2006, so it really didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.
The government continues its insane “no crisis” tune, while the country is gripped in an icy (and dark) winter. The electricity regulator insists that consumers curb their demand in the interest of fairness to others, and Eskom advertises to get people to buy less of its product. Policy wonks in academia weave high-falutin’ tales of the social objectives of electrification, while the poor lack the power to heat the shacks that do duty for the houses the government promised and never delivered. They’re reduced to their dangerous paraffin stoves and unhealthy wood fires.
As if the situation wasn’t sufficiently tenuous, environmental groups agitate and litigate and remonstrate that coal is too dirty, nuclear is too risky, gas is too expensive and even wind and solar aren’t good enough. Wish the sanctimonious lot of them would all go mine a bloody asteroid and beam us some free, clean, alien energy, instead of lecturing those who actually try to make do in the real world.
Eskom has electrified over three million new homes, it’s true. It has kept the price of electricity relatively stable in real terms. But what’s the point of cheap electricity if it is switched off half the time?
Eskom calls itself “an established and innovative forerunner in meeting the demands of life in the 21st century.” I’m not kidding. Ruling-party stalwart Valli Moosa, whose stalwartness has nothing to do with him being chairman of Eskom, wrote that. You can find lots of great one-liners in his comedy skit, entitled Eskom Holdings Annual Report 2006.
He said Eskom’s strategy was “confounding those who argued hat a national energy crisis was unfolding.” Meantime, Alec Erwin, the minister in charge of Eskom, conceded that growth had been underestimated and consequently there had been underinvestment in infrastructure in the 1990s.
He said this in an article republished on his department’s own website, though without even the courtesy of an attribution to Business Report, which resulted in the delicious irony that the Department of Public Enterprises, in an article on its own website, complained that it couldn’t get further comment from itself. It’s the bolt, you see.
And while Moosa did a riff on skills: “Eskom is home to a vast base of knowledge and intellectual capital,” the article Erwin’s department republished was actually headlined Power cuts blamed on skills blackout. And we’re supposed to believe them.
Granted, Eskom has no private shareholders, so I guess it can lie through its teeth as much as it wants. It’s only lying to the people, after all, and the people are sheep. Anyway, it’s hard to operate a spreadsheet, and on top of that Eskom has to handle the challenges of not getting price signals from the market, nor feel the consequences of its actions in its collective pocket. People who aren’t in government and who argue that governments cannot, by definition, deliver the goods, don’t understand such pressure and complexity.
It’s funny that the powerful bureaucrats earnestly discussed their weighty policy matters while being completely in the dark. What’s far less funny is that shops are throwing out tons of tainted food. Companies are losing the very profits they need to fund job growth. And the huddled masses are huddling in subzero nights.
What will it take to wake up those who still believe that governments are the answer to helping the poor? Those who point to good intentions as the real measure of a government’s moral right to rule? When Eskom says: “As part of its accelerated shared growth initiative for South Africa, government aims to ensure electricity for every South African by 2012,” do they seriously believe that this will happen? Are they willing to bet on it?
Because it’s high time that these fools and their money are parted.
