EDITORIAL: Eskom’s implosion is worse than you ever imagined

You can almost understand why President Cyril Ramaphosa is entirely schtum about the couch dollars that vanished from his Phala Phala game farm.

After all, when he does pronounce on any issue of national importance, it often comes back to bite him — a luxury he can ill afford with opportunists such as Lindiwe Sisulu angling to knife him in the back at every turn.

Earlier this year, with South Africa in the grip of its worst Eskom-induced blackouts, a clip resurfaced of Ramaphosa in September 2015, saying: “In another 18 months to two years, you will forget that the challenges we had with relation to power and energy and Eskom ever happened.”

People are used to politicians pulling the wool over their eyes. But to be so profoundly wrong about a subject that has such a direct impact on people’s lives seemed especially careless. 

It is not an overstatement to suggest that the numerous fibs on load-shedding are one of the primary contributors to the lack of trust South Africans have in their government.

Particularly when the explanations are binary: either the politicians lied, or they didn’t know how bad things were and made promises anyway — equally alarming, but in a different way.

A few weeks ago Ramaphosa addressed that 2015 faux pax, and said he “genuinely did believe then that we had found the solution to our energy problems” in Medupi and Kusile, but the spectacular disasters at those power stations were entirely unexpected.

Well, the bad news this week is that Ramaphosa was more wrong than even he could know. In its latest power assessment, Eskom confirmed that not only is it not close to fixing load-shedding, it won’t be able to meet the country’s electricity needs for the next five years. 

“The situation will worsen as the plant performance of Eskom’s fleet continue[s] to trend downwards, power stations shut down and demand grows,” the report says.

From 2023 to 2027, the report says that even in a low-demand scenario, in which new generation capacity comes online, the system won’t be able to meet demand. And in a worst-case scenario, the energy supply gap will increase by 40% by 2027.

The implications for the economy are immense.

The bottom line is that South Africa won’t be able to power the sort of GDP growth needed to meaningfully reduce its other crisis: unemployment.

Politically, there are unwelcome implications too. The ANC government is well aware that this sort of prognosis is poisonous for its hopes of retaining power in the 2024 election and beyond, so the populist promises are multiplying.

Last week, Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi spoke of writing off the debt owed to Eskom by Soweto residents.

Now, it’s clear many residents can’t afford extortionate power bills, but what happens when you exempt an entire region for expedient political reasons? Why should anyone else, especially in poor areas, break their backs to pay their bills?

These are the sort of moral hazard debates the government’s mismanagement of the power crisis has wrought.

But at least we know now that, whatever the politicians tell you at election time, blackouts aren’t under control. And won’t be for a while.