DAVID CHRISTIANSON: Why Ramaphosa can’t speed up his energy reforms

For a man who was apparently on the verge of resigning in early December, President Cyril Ramaphosa seems to be in a remarkably strong position politically just a month later. The ANC’s 55th national conference turned out to be a personal triumph for Ramaphosa, putting him in a position of authority within his own party that SA has not seen since the presidency of Thabo Mbeki.

Will Ramaphosa finally use his power to implement the reform agenda he has spoken about so frequently? Hopes have been expressed that he will finally enact the investment climate reforms needed to unleash the pent-up power of SA’s private sector and attract foreign investment on scale. Unfortunately, there is scant chance of this happening any time soon.

The tardiness of implementation has been attributed to many factors ranging from the president’s personality to factionalism within the governing party and opposition from trade unions. Some commentators have argued that when push comes to shove Ramaphosa is likely to choose party above country, especially given opinion polls that predict ANC support will fall below 50% in the 2024 general election. His desire to “renew” the ANC through a clampdown on corruption is no doubt deep and genuine. But will this come at the expense of investment climate reform?

There is some validity to all of these criticisms. But the most profound explanation is simply that Ramaphosa has developed a style of government that is over-bureaucratic and dysfunctional because he wants to control both the desired outcomes and the processes required to get us there.

This criticism is not the same as suggesting that SA is close to state collapse. Despite the ongoing problem of cadre deployment and numerous weak areas in government, there are still many able officials who are dedicated, skilled and hard-working. There is nothing wrong with the personnel in Operation Vulindlela, the Treasury and many other clusters of capacity within the government, for instance.

The problem is that Ramaphosa’s bureaucratic machine has become so complicated that it is now all but clogged up. The January 12 publication of the president’s public programme provided some hint of this over-complexity, describing the “various technical workstreams” operating under the national energy crisis committee, each under a different cabinet minister. Ramaphosa has apparently “further demanded more urgency and speed in implementation of all priority areas and actions laid out in the National Energy Plan”.

But this may prove impossible if he tries to control too many players and processes. Energy reform has to account to the Treasury, Operation Vulindlela, the department of energy, the department of public works & infrastructure, the department of trade, industry & competition, Eskom, the REI4P Office, Nedlac, Nersa, the presidential climate commission and the many players that make up the private sector both locally and overseas. This has become such a tangle of workstreams, committees, briefings and “engagements” as to be beyond the management capacity of any single person or office.

This morass has undesirable implications. All those players involved in trying to “accelerate” reform are mired in complexity. It is no wonder that business complains about Nedlac being nothing more than a talk shop, or that the abilities of the able officials at Operation Vulindlela are wasted trying to align or manage workplans, organisational interests and red tape. It is little wonder that it took half a year to publish amendments to the Electricity Regulation Act to allow uncapped embedded generation — supposedly an expedited process — or that the National Transmission Company still doesn’t exist more than three years after it was announced.

Second, there are significant and unanticipated gaps in the reform management machine. These become inevitable when a single office tries to manage every part of the process. In his National Energy Plan, announced in July 2022, Ramaphosa doubled the size of the sixth renewables bid window from 2,600MW to 5,200MW. Yet when the bids closed only 860MW had been awarded thanks to unanticipated grid access constraints.

The limitations of the bureaucratic reform machine were such that no-one had informed the president of this looming problem. In fact, it is not clear that any of the multiple players involved in the energy space realised there was a problem. The president certainly appears to have been unaware of the issue.

When political leaders try to reform complex systems there are virtues to depoliticising some of the more contentious issues. Removing a matter like the role of the private sector in energy generation from the sphere of public contestation and dealing with it through administrative processes can be effective. But the political leader driving the process has to ensure it does not become an endless series of meetings that go nowhere. That, unfortunately, has been the trend under Ramaphosa.

Depoliticising the reform process also means he is unable to play his strongest card. Opinion polls have shown that he is far more popular than the ANC itself. The Social Research Foundation found last July that nearly half of the ANC voters polled (48%) considered Ramaphosa’s leadership “very important” to their support for the party, while only 16% regarded the Ramaphosa factor as “not important at all”. About 39% of those polled said they would continue to support Ramaphosa even if he broke away from the ANC and formed a new party.

These polls suggest Ramaphosa has immense potential authority that he is simply not using to the full. Instead he has created an enormously complicated executive process that simultaneously has little authority in its own right and delivers inadequate outcomes. There is nothing clear and decisive about the Ramaphosa governmental machine. Yet that is precisely what is needed from the perspective of potential investors.

Until the person at the apex of the executive in SA accepts that investment climate reform requires surrendering control over private investment outcomes, this cumbersome managerial system is likely to lumber on, actually impeding the growth and investment it seeks to facilitate. Under these circumstances, the harder the president tries the more reform will be thwarted.

• Christianson, a freelance writer, has been a political scientist, NGO researcher and development banker.