Who else does the ANC expect South Africans to blame?

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According to Andrew Kenny on The Daily Friend, Peter Mabe, the ANC’s national spokesman, was arrogant and boastful when asked about the ANC’s record on electricity supply. He refused to accept that the ANC was in any way responsible for the fact that Eskom had been a resounding success from 1923 to 1990, but then collapsed under ANC rule. He said don’t play the blame game. Who else can South Africans blame for our lack of services, especially electricity but also increasingly water, if not the ruling party? –Sandra Laurence

Electricity is now a political issue

By Andrew Kenny

The DA has decided that our electrical calamity is a political issue. Good. Electricity is now a political issue; it was not before 1994; the ANC has done it now.

The DA seems to have started its 2024 election campaign by attacking the ANC for our blackouts. Good. The ANC is mainly responsible for the disastrous performance of Eskom, once the best electricity company in the world.

Yesterday at lunchtime at the traffic lights in Sun Valley (between Fish Hoek and Kommetjie in Cape Town) I saw a small crowd of DA protesters, dressed in blue, holding signs that said: Shedding kills jobs . (It’s on a large scale). They seemed to get a lot of support from passing motorists. Almost all of the protesters were black Africans. This is interesting because most of the people in the area are white except for those who live in the adjacent township of Masiphumelele. Had they been overwhelmingly white, the DA would have been accused of racism. Since most were black, I guess the DA will be accused of (well, something or other; how about exploiting black people?).

I welcome the protests and think the DA is absolutely right to bring down the political capital of Eskoms under the ANC. The ANC itself seems more worried about this than any of its disastrous failures in the past. Time and time again the ANC ruling elite have shown their utter contempt for ordinary black people, but never before have they encountered such united hostility. like on this.

The ANC elite has systematically destroyed the education and lives of ordinary black children with its horrible schools while sending its own children to expensive, posh schools with mostly white teachers. He caused disastrous unemployment with his destructive labor laws and bargaining advice. He cursed poor black people in ANC townships with water shortages and sewage in the streets. He destroyed public rail transportation for black workers. But never before has it been met with such outrage as by our increasing blackouts. I shouldn’t have foreseen this. This may just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the latest affront to ordinary black people that goes too far.

The ANC seems scared, but not scared enough to make a public admission that we have at least ten years of blackout ahead of us.

Arrogant and boastful

In a radio interview, I heard Peter Mabe, national spokesman for the ANC, being asked about the ANC’s record on electricity supply. He was arrogant and boastful. He refused to accept that the ANC was in any way responsible for the fact that Eskom had been a resounding success from 1923 to 1990, but then collapsed under ANC rule. He said don’t play the blame game. He obfuscated technical issues, never explaining what he meant. Tell me, Mr Mabe, sir, if we vote for the ANC in 2024, and it destroys Eskom even more, with even worse power cuts, will you say in 2029 that we should not play the game of the blame?

At this month’s dreadful Davos 2023 meeting, under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), where our fabulously wealthy lords and masters gather to explain their latest plan to control us, South Africa’s finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, announced, Finally, in the next 12 to 18 months, we can say that load shedding is a thing of the past. How can he tell such a lie?

Until now, I had considered it honest and level-headed. He must have been under strong pressure to say such nonsense in public, pressure from an ANC that seems to be panicking. Perhaps he had remembered Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise in 2015: in another 18 months to 2 years, you will forget the challenges we had in relation to power and Eskom never existed.

From around 1923 to 1990, Escom (later Eskom) provided South Africa’s growing, industrialized economy with sufficient, reliable and affordable electricity. He didn’t do it by miraculous means, but simply by allowing Eskoms engineers and managers to continue their work. In no election before 1994 was electricity ever an issue; it was taken for granted as plentiful and reliable.

The governments from 1923 to 1990, while racist to the white minority, did not otherwise interfere with the operation of the public electricity supplier. Eskom’s only mandate was to generate electricity and cover the cost. Around 1990, senior, mostly white, Eskom executives started messing around. The stupidest thing was refusing to build new power stations when it was obvious to a schoolboy that we needed them.

Then the ANC took over and proceeded to plunder and destroy Eskom with racial engineering, corruption and crazy ideology. BEE’s supply forced Eskom to move from good, consistent and cheap coal to bad, inconsistent and very expensive coal. (The good here has a South African context. Most of our coal is lean, high in ash and low in energy. But our good coal, which Eskom was burning successfully, was of consistent quality and content. energy high enough for our power plants. )

Eskom disintegrated

Appointments were made on race and political connections, affirmative action, deployment and executive transformation. Eskom has disintegrated. It was largely the fault of the ANC, because of its political policies, which it refuses to change. President Ramaphosa is adamant in his continued support for BEE and the deployment of cadres, two main reasons for Eskom’s downfall.

The DA is right to attack the ANC’s corruption, racism and incompetence in its governance of Eskom. It is fair to suggest that Eskom should be fixed with competent engineers and managers appointed on merit, regardless of race or political connections. It’s fair to say that sourcing should be strictly about who can offer the best goods and services at the lowest price. (Though I wish it was clearer and firmer on these things.) But the DAs’ own energy proposals are mixed.

The new DA Mayor of Cape Town is Geordin Hill-Lewis, a confident, exuberant and very capable man. He got off to a good start, tackling head-on the often overlooked issues of public decay and homelessness in Cape Town. I was delighted to see one of his new volunteer police officers patrolling the beach at Fish Hoek.

On the electricity supply, he offers a mixed bag. He says he wants to launch calls for tenders for 500 MW of dispatchable electricity. Fine, if he can get it at a good price. (Dispatchable electricity is electricity when you want it, for as long as you want it, i.e. useful electricity. Electricity that comes out of a solar panel or a wind turbine is not dispatchable, and is therefore useless for grid electricity, worthless. ) He wants to encourage Cape Town residents not to use electricity at peak times, when the city has to pay the highest tariff high of Eskom. As well, if he can implement it, which might be difficult. He wants to get 200 MW of renewable energy, that is to say solar and wind. Not good. Solar and wind energy are useless for grid electricity, as has been demonstrated around the world, despite the trillions of dollars that have been spent on them.

The DA wants to buy electricity from households with solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs, with feed-in tariffs. It is iniquitous. Solar panels produce electricity when it is not wanted (in the middle of sunny days) and does not produce it when it is wanted (for breakfast and dinner on dark winter mornings and evenings) .

Absolutely useless

How much is the city proposing to pay wealthy households who can afford solar panels for their unwanted electricity? Batteries, of course, are absolutely useless for storing grid electricity. If you don’t believe me, try to buy solar panels and batteries, and tell me how much their electricity costs you to cook your dinner in the dead of winter in Cape Town.

Cape Town benefits from Steenbras’ excellent pumped storage power plant. This 180 MW plant was built in 1979. It has an upper dam and a lower dam, connected by a pipeline. When the electricity demand is low, the pumps push the water from the bottom to the top. When raised, the pumps become turbines and water flows through them, generating electricity. Cape Town’s total electricity demand is over 3,000 MW, but Steenbrass’ contribution to smoothing peaks and troughs is significant, reducing outages somewhat.

As the DA protests against load shedding unfolded, I heard about the ANC’s latest incomprehensible nuclear misstep, which jeopardizes Koeberg’s future operation. Koeberg gets half of its nuclear fuel from France and the other half from the United States. In the United States, the Westinghouse company manufactures fuel components, then processes them into final fuel in Sweden, before sending them to Koeberg.

Westinghouse does this under a strictly enforced license from the US nuclear regulator. Regulators’ primary concern is to ensure that all countries comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which ensures that all nuclear materials and equipment are used only for peaceful nuclear energy purposes. and not for nuclear weapons. South Africa had to sign to continue this license on December 31, 2022. It was the job of a senior official in the South African Department of Energy to sign. He does not have.

Canceled the license

The US regulator canceled the license. We may run out of fuel from Westinghouse for Koeberg. This happened in the midst of Koeberg’s major refit of the Unit 1 and Stage 4/5/6 power outages.

Why didn’t the DOE official sign on to continue the fuel license for South Africa’s most successful and desperately needed power plant? Will Pule Mabe tell us? Will Enoch Godongwana tell us? Will Cyril Ramaphosa tell us? Or will we be told that the ANC cannot be held responsible for the Ministry of Energy, which is part of the ANC government?

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