The ANC is strongly considering establishing a second state-owned power utility to reduce the risk posed by Eskom’s failings, President Cyril Ramaphosa told delegates at the SA Communist Party’s elective conference in Boksburg on Friday.
It is hardly surprising that he chose that particular opportunity to present the proposal, which was initially made by mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, as it would resonate with many of the assembled delegates, who were raised and fed the fodder of Soviet folly for decades.
After all, socialist competition or socialist emulation (Russian: “sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovanie” or “sotssorevnovanie”) was a form of competition between state enterprises or between individuals, enshrined in the practices of the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc states. It was championed by Vladimir Lenin initially and rolled out by Joseph Stalin.
As Russian historian, journalist, writer, critic and dissident Mikhail Heller reminds us, it was enforced by the KGB and involved competing teams within the parameters of five-year plans that “led to increasingly unrealistic targets, which could only be satisfied with cheating, double accounting, hoarding of resources and last-minute cramming — which in the long term led to a collapse of the supply chain in the economy”.
The ANC government’s plan for a second Eskom draws directly from this obsolete and past error, which was once manifest in the inward-looking experiments of a regime and ideology destined for extinction. It harks back to a fascination with all things Soviet that still runs through much of the tripartite alliance of communists, unionists and nationalists that constitute the government. The governing party still affirms, at every congress, the precepts of the national democratic revolution (NDR).
The NDR has its roots in developments in the Soviet Union, where — as pointed out by Irina Filatova, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow specialising in African history and the history of ties between Russia and SA — “In the late 1950s the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] central committee formed a special group of advisers to work on the theoretical problems of national liberation movements. It was ultimately led by Karen N Brutents, one of the deputy heads of the central committee’s international department, and it was under him, in the 1970s, that the theory was fully developed.”
Economic shibboleths
For three decades, from 1960 until 1991, the Soviet Union was the ANC’s closest and the most important ally. The USSR supplied and trained the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, rendered logistical, financial and political support, and assisted in creating and maintaining the international anti-apartheid movement. But it was more — it was an ideological home, and even though the Soviet Union has crumbled, many still cling to the old precepts and sense of obligation and loyalty.
There are some parallels with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where for many citizens national pride remains fixed within the Soviet matrix and historical achievements and territorial acquisitions of the imperial and Soviet eras — not to mention the post-Soviet annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine — remain popular in the minds of a diminished nation. In hard times many hanker after the economic shibboleths and practices of an era that defined its existence on nationalistic pride and an ideology — no matter how misplaced and futile.
The trouble is, these yearnings, this loyalty, this capture, rooted in the broken past, will not fix Eskom’s problems. It will open yet another door to a huge edifice that requires funding and specialised labour of the kind Eskom is itself short of. Moreover, it will present yet another trough for feeding cadres and cement into the foundations a BEE regime — all of which is destined to bury the initiative.
After extensive criticism the president appears to have backed down somewhat from his sentiment that a second state-owned power utility to rival embattled Eskom is a good idea, and now says Eskom takes priority. Speaking during an oversight visit to the Tutuka Power Station in Mpumalanga on Saturday he is reported to have said: “What we now need to do is to reposition Eskom and make sure that we generate enough energy for the country.”
Political shuffling
In typical Ramaphosa fashion he has sought to placate one set of potential voters and is now sidestepping the fallout. It won’t wash though, and his carefully crafted historical placement of Eskom Version Two plans should be plain for those who understand the historical background.
This political shuffling aside, the immediate alternative is clear: on May 12 the DA held a media conference in which we called for a state of disaster to be declared on Eskom and the electricity sector. We emphasised that this declaration should be ring-fenced across the electricity value chain, from generation to distribution and transmission.
We understood that load-shedding had become a national crisis and that Eskom (let alone Eskom Version Two) was never going to solve the crisis in its entirety, regardless of any action it took. In calling for a ring-fenced state of disaster, the DA is motivated by removing impediments for the full participation of independent power producers (IPPs) to bring new generation capacity online in the shortest time possible, while Eskom’s existing fleet of power plants is attended to.
To ensure accountability the DA proposed the establishment of an ad hoc parliamentary committee, because we understand that parliament should play a central role in enforcing accountability and sustained implementation of project deliverables — not hare-brained schemes pulled straight out of a bygone Soviet era’s playbook. What is patently clear though is that the government doesn’t.
• Cachalia, an MP, is DA public enterprises spokesperson.
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