KEVIN MCCALLUM: Will Ramokgopa sprint past Wayde to his goal?
The good news this week that Wayde van Niekerk would take part in the SA Championships once again was only over-shadowed by the growing sense that a pretender is trying to claim the title of the quickest long-distance sprinter in SA.
The minister of electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, sprinted around the country’s power plants, then galloped into grand statements on a problem that has a long distance yet to run. To put it another way, if the minister is running a 400m race to end load-shedding, he has gone out far too hard in the first 100m and left little in the tank for the next 300m.
The Daily Maverick quoted former Eskom executive manager and former City Power Joburg senior executive Vally Padayachee thus: “The minister [of electricity] has hit the ground, not running, but sprinting. So as the super project manager … you want to see a lot of energy. And you have got to make a statement to your team.”
And, boy, has he made some statements. Kusile’s “problems and challenges … are technical problems, they have nothing to do with so-called corruption”. There is nothing like getting a talking point in quickly to ease the conversation away from corruption and any possible links to the ruling party. The SIU, who have secured preservation orders against those they believe are involved in corruption at Kusile, may differ with the minister. Google translate tells me “Kusile” means “It’s crazy” in isiZulu. I also found on the interweb that “Kusile is an Ndebele and Siswati word meaning ‘the dawn has come’ ”. I’ll go with isiZulu on this.
What next? A reference to a higher power? Perhaps a little light and badly conceived humour about Easter and how there may be no lights? A little joke that showed the minister has learnt that if you state the bleeding obvious enough times people will think that it is you who came up with the concept.
“Load-shedding will not be ended through an act of god. So Easter is coming, irrespective of the amount of prayer that we put in, it won’t resolve load-shedding. Load-shedding will be resolved by getting the units back online. Load-shedding will be resolved by ensuring that we are able to improve the operational efficiency of these units,” said the minister.
But back to Van Niekerk and his journey to improve on his operational efficiency, which showed welcome gains in 2022. He ran a season best 44.33sec in September at the Gala dei Castelli in Switzerland, beating rival Kirani James of Grenada. He has had much to overcome after a moment that could have ended it all.
In October 2017 came the injury Edwin Moses called a “knucklehead move” when Van Niekerk tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus cartilage in his right leg while playing a charity touch rugby game. It wrote off all of 2018. Then he had bone bruising in 2019. Then came the pandemic that shut down the world.
“I’ve gone back to fighting for my dream from scratch,” Van Niekerk told the Guardian in 2021. The Tokyo Olympics was perhaps a year too soon for Van Niekerk and as his body and his form were rebuilding, getting his head back in the space he needed to take on the world was as important.
“Obviously with an injury like that,” Van Niekerk told the Guardian, “you need to be very patient when it comes to your physical recovery. But mentally you think the same way you’ve always thought. You want to be back on the track, you’re ready to challenge your records, you want to compete against the best in the world but physically that’s no longer your reality. So mentally I had to make a big shift.”
We may see the results of that shift in Potch at the SA Championships this weekend, a return of the seamless, fluid power that stunned the world in Rio. Van Niekerk needs to hit the ground sprinting, not running, to make a statement ahead of Paris 2024. Van Niekerk is not one to make false promises or to speak too quickly of new dawns, but a man who could once again make the world stop and say: “It’s crazy.”