Turf out the ANC liars
I’ve been wondering what the point is of blackouts during off-peak times. Nevermind that it isn’t the slot I was told to expect, but why would my power need go out between 9pm and 11pm on Monday? Surely demand can’t be that high so late at night? Why get outages between 10am and 3pm? Peak times are mornings and evenings, not so?
So to answer the question, I’ve watched the power usage charts over at Power Alert for a few days. Here’s what I see:
This represents national power usage. Brown indicates critical levels. What can one conclude from this? One shouldn’t presume that the chart is drawn to scale. But it does show that power usage is constantly at critical levels, not only during peak usage times, but all day from 7am to 11pm.
And what does that tell us? That this problem isn’t new and sudden. That it’s been brewing for a considerable time. Eskom may claim unscheduled service outages at power stations, but that’s because, by Eskom’s own admission, they’re running them as hard as possible.
And from that, we can conclude that when Thabo Mbeki told us in May 2006 that “there is no crisis”, noting that supply (37GW plus 2GW peak capacity) exceeded projected demand (35GW), he was lying. Don’t tell me he didn’t read the reports. He has apologised, yes, but for what? For being wrong? Sure, the government was wrong, but as Andrew Kenny writes at Fin24, it had no excuse for being wrong. He knew what economic growth was. He knew what Eskom’s supply and demand projections were. Anyone with grade 4 arithmetic could figure out we were headed for a crisis, even then. The idea that private sector companies would build generation plants without being able to price their product for a reasonable return on investment was self-delusion, and to sell the idea, he and his ministers simply lied to us. (Aside: Kenny makes a good point about Alec Erwin. He may believe a hammer and sickle are the tools of the economist’s trade, but he wasn’t in charge of public enterprises in the 1990s when this half-baked plan was cooked up.)
“Whatever needs to be done to make sure that the economy grows and new investors come into the economy is being done on the energy and other sides,” he said at the time. Lies.
“The Honourable Member is proceeding from the wrong assumption that our government has failed to meet South Africa’s electricity capacity needs,” he told an opposition parliamentarian. Lies.
Erwin and President Thabo Mbeki have played down the impact of the blackouts (reported Fin24 in August 2006), saying the outages would not affect
investment and would not derail efforts to lift economic growth to 6% from below 5% now. Lies.
In May 2006, after the first blackouts hit Cape Town, Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu told Donovan Jackson, writing for Mining and Manufacturing Systems Magazine: “Your assertion that planning did not anticipate the demand is not correct. … The recent events in the Cape is not (and should not be seen as) an indication that South Africa has run out of capacity and therefore cannot meet the demand.” He added that the problem was impossible to foresee. Lies.
“I don’t think we are facing a crisis, we firmly believe the long term plans make it very comfortable for us to meet our needs,” said the deputy director-general in the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs, Nelisiwe Magubane, in February 2006. Lies.
In January 2007, the office of Public Enterprises minister Alec Erwin told Reuters in a statement that he was “confident that South Africa as a whole will not be plunged into darkness”. Lies.
“You don’t have permission to access /energy_in_africa/975198.htm on this server.” Lies.
“We don’t believe there is a crisis in the energy sector in South Africa. There are challenges that don’t amount to a crisis,” said Sandile Nogxina, director general of the Department of Minerals and Energy in June 2007. Lies.
So what about the other promises? Health care? As a surgeon in Nelspruit pointed out in a blog post to which he linked in a comment on this site, that’s lies too.
Gautrain? Well, we’ll see about that. The tunnel boring machines hired at huge expense don’t work too well without power either.
Without any shame, without any loyalty to the people that elected them, the ANC government, from Thabo Mbeki on down, simply lied to us to cover up their own failures.
So where is the truth in all this? Well, Thabo Mbeki did tell an election rally (reports Reuters) that providing these basic services was “central” to maintaining freedom. And that much is true.
But isn’t that anti-campaigning? “Failure is not an option. We failed. Vote for us.” Huh?
Why on earth would anyone still believe that the ANC can deliver basic services? Why would they think, as Richard Catto apparently does, that merely electing a more populist leader for the same party of central planning, national socialism and crony-capitalism will make all the difference? At best that leader, Jacob Zuma, has shown a singular inability to manage just his personal affairs. What would make him any better at planning government service delivery?
Has anyone been held responsible? Has anyone been fired for incompetence, for lying, for failure to deliver? Is that really what happened to Thabo Mbeki in Polokwane last month? I don’t think so. Do you think anyone will be fired? I don’t think so. Will the ANC, which is the source, as ruling party, for the policies the president implements, take responsibility? I don’t think so. And even if they say they do, can we believe them? I don’t think so.
Isn’t it time to fire the liars, for a start, and then revisit the notion that government is capable of delivering services? Isn’t it time we rely on the energy, innovation and hard work of ordinary South Africans to make a better life for themselves? Ordinary South Africans earned their own liberation. They got together, across party lines, to overthrow Apartheid. Isn’t it time to look beyond struggle credentials and loyalty to the ANC, and look to a future in which South Africans can reasonably expect to prosper? We may already have missed a window of opportunity, in terms of global economic health. Now we can’t even afford the economic growth we need, lest we run out of energy to fuel it. Isn’t it time we, ordinary South Africans, do something about the government that, since liberation, not only failed us, but lied about it to our faces?
The ANC’s slogan of “a better life for all” is clearly an empty promise. What is a democracy to do other than turf the useless liars out?
Updated: Added Gautrain paragraph after first publication.
Again, you tell it like it is.
Forwarding the URL to this article to anyone who’ll listen. :)
I dont’t blame the skollies in government for lying their way through every failure, for enriching themselves without shame or limit while focusing on tranforming everything to represent the ‘demographic realities’ of the country. They do it because they can, and exploit the reality that populism, clan loyalties and personalities who do their war songs well capture the imagination of the electorate.
This country deserves the governance it has mandated. I urge every ANC supporter to refrain from whinging while he consumes his meals in the dark, or suffers the frustration of broken promises.
The African Rennaissance of which our hounourable president is so fond of waxing poetic can only occur once their is a rennaissance in the thinking of the grass roots voter. A move away from rhetoric and voting loyalties based on spurious and irrelevant appeal in favour of real delivery is required.
A free country is free to go a long, long way in the wrong direction.
Great post, but for this bit “the same party of central planning, national socialism and crony-capitalism “. Central planning my arse, the Nats both had more and did it better. National socialism? Examples please? Crony-capitalism - ok, spot on.
Please Ivo, your bright, don’t tell me you really think that the unbridled free market will help solve our ills?
I do, actually. Yes, central planning — in this case state-owned monopolies — can be done better or worse, but either way, they cannot respond to price signals, do not have to raise quality and lower prices to compete, and worst of all, there’s no alternative for their customers, if things go wrong. Running state-owned public works for national benefit amounts to national socialism. It’s well intended, and often cheered by the beneficiaries as long as it works, but in the long run, it’s doomed to failure for lack of sustained competitive pressure.
And prey tell how would you introduce competition into telecoms? Would you also advocate we privatize the roads? How about the courts?
Must say, Rockey street in its heyday beats the hell out of a day in Sandton City.
@Wessel
Picking on competition in telecoms is a bit misguided. If I wanted to choose an example of the failure of central planning, the South African telecoms sector would be at the top of my list.
The whole reason we have such a mess is because of government intervention. There are dozens of companies out there just waiting to provide real telecoms services, but they cannot - because government says they can’t.
And even in the areas they are allowed to provide a service, they need to get a license that last time I checked was not available because the regulator is still converting existing license.
As for privatizing the courts: given the choice between a dysfunctional court where the clerks don’t even have access to a stapler, and a court where a private company is making a profit but the court smoothly handles twice the workload of the government run version, at the same cost, which would you choose?