HERMAN MASHABA: Blaming load-shedding on just energy transition is ANC polls ploy

Every few years the ANC election machinery kicks into high gear trying to distract the electorate from its repeated governance failures — grant payment hiccups, Prasa rail dysfunction, the breakdown in basic education, rising joblessness and state capture.

The strategy has been to try to shift blame — including by pointing the finger at its own outgoing leaders in a bid to convince voters that things will be different under a new ANC leader (Ramaphoria, anyone?).

With the 2024 elections about a year away the ANC’s desperation to cling to power is again in full swing, using the same tactic. In Gauteng, where the party is at its weakest outside the Western Cape, premier Panyaza Lesufi has tried to deflect from governance failures such as Covid-19 corruption and the Life Esidimeni and e-toll debacles through gimmicks such as the Nasi Ispani and Crime Wardens projects, which only provide false hope.

And the murmurs have started concerning deputy president Paul Mashatile: that in him we have a more decisive leader than President Cyril Ramaphosa, and that this might be a panacea for SA’s problems. But no attempted spin can be more blatant than the ANC’s attempt to absolve itself from the job-destroying load-shedding disaster by blaming the West and the just energy transition.

The ANC knows that continued and increasing levels of load-shedding is one of the greatest threats to its electoral support in next year’s elections. Secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, a former head of party election strategy, has repeatedly admitted that load-shedding is hurting the governing party at the polls, with its devastating 2021 municipal election results partly blamed on power outages.

Its election campaign will therefore be premised largely on managing load-shedding, including scheduling the polls for May, when the threat of load-shedding is usually at its lowest and the effect of rolling blackouts on the lives of the electorate therefore most subdued.   

Rewrite history

Over the past few weeks we have heard both mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe and electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa incorrectly claiming that SA’s current load-shedding predicament was caused by the premature closure of the Komati power station and the “Western-sponsored” just energy transition. In a Sunday newspaper ANC researcher Phapano Phasha repeated this lie: “Government’s premature transition from coal to renewable energy is an economic injustice that has led to load-shedding, job losses and ghost towns in and around Mpumalanga,” he stated.

Nothing is further from the truth. This is an attempt by the ANC to absolve itself from responsibility before the elections. We should be extremely vigilant in this regard. We cannot allow the ANC to rewrite history in its favour and thereby deceive the electorate again. The truth is simple but devastating: load-shedding has been implemented in SA since 2007, and in the 16 years of ANC governance since then it has been unable to solve the electricity crises.

The situation has in fact worsened, with load-shedding stage 6 now a regular occurrence. ActionSA’s court action to have load-shedding declared unconstitutional revealed that government was alerted to the risk of future power shortages in the early 2000s but ignored repeated warnings by the then Eskom management. Instead of addressing the country’s looming power crisis, the ANC chose to hide its head in the sand and use Eskom as a feeding trough for grand-scale corruption, as numerous court cases and inquiries have shown.

Information from the state-funded Council for Scientific & Industrial Research reveals how ANC management has resulted in the sharpest decline in energy availability factor (EAF) at Eskom over the past decade. It is therefore now burning the most diesel yet to avoid higher stages of load-shedding as the 2024 election draws nearer.

Unlike what Mantashe, Ramokgopa and Phasha would like us to believe, load-shedding is not a sudden occurrence but the result of a systemic breakdown of energy provision and corruption by the ANC and its cadres.   

Loss factor

Mpumalanga is also not filled with “ghost towns” because of the closure of power stations, but because the ANC has mismanaged SA’s economy to such a disastrous extent. Aside from the cost of load-shedding to the economy, estimated at R900m a day, policy mismanagement by the governing party has led to declining mining investment and thousands of job losses, much of it concentrated in Mpumalanga.

The closure of the Komati power station was already announced in the integrated resources plan of 2019 — long before the just energy transition was announced. It was also not SA’s “best-performing power station” as claimed by Ramokgopa — it had an unplanned capability loss factor of 30.8%.

The implementation of the just energy transition may actually help Komati contribute more to the grid. Before its closure, the 62-year-old power station had a maximum output of just 114MW, but now Eskom is adding 150MW of solar PV capacity on the property, 150MW of battery storage and 70MW of wind turbine capacity.

Ramokgopa and Mantashe should therefore be grateful for the just energy transition, which is helping mobilise one of the largest investments in SA’s grid in recent years to help end the load-shedding disaster. This represents the first major expansion in electricity generation since the construction of Medupi and Kusile started in 2008 — 15 years ago.

ActionSA has long maintained that to solve the country’s energy disaster the energy market should be liberalised by removing barriers to entry. Removing the cap on private generation has already led to a surge in added energy capacity — an additional 4,000MW, which represents four stages of load-shedding. It is precisely because of the private sector’s investment in this capacity that SA was able to largely avoid higher stages of load-shedding in winter — not due to an improvement at Eskom as the ANC would have us believe. 

A liberalised energy market should be created in which private players directly compete with the state to supply electricity, with the state maintaining control of strategic infrastructure such as the national grid. Where this has been implemented elsewhere in the world electricity prices have fallen, whereas in SA Eskom was recently granted a whopping 18.49% electricity price increase.

While the ANC is desperate to absolve itself from responsibility for vote-costing load-shedding, it must not be allowed to deceive voters as in past elections. We should not allow the ANC to rewrite narratives to suit its own needs: telling voters that this time things might be different.

All South Africans — politicians, civil society, donors, journalists, the private sector and citizens — have a collective responsibility to hold the ANC to account for the destruction it has caused and start the difficult work of fixing the country. We cannot afford to allow ourselves to be fooled by the ANC yet again.

• Mashaba is president of ActionSA.