A couple of months ago, as another bout of acute load-shedding became a daily reality, Eskom took the rare step of alerting us that such blackouts will persist throughout the winter. This statement, from a company that has previously claimed sabotage, broken conveyor belts and even wet coal as triggers for load-shedding, came as a painful but honest concession.
The increased demand during the winter season has always been a pressure point for Eskom. Theoretically, higher demand requires many more generators to be active and in service. According to Eskom, however, its maintenance record — which is poor — has increased the propensity for unplanned breakdowns.
When the pandemic hit us in 2020 and ways of work were altered and adapted, an opportunity emerged for Eskom to ramp up efforts to address its maintenance backlog. During hard lockdowns, when many offices and industrial parks scaled down operations and reliance on the grid, common sense implied that Eskom would make the best of the crisis to address its long-standing issues.
As it now turns out, whatever was done during that period achieved little. As a result, the backlog lives on and the threat of blackouts persists. When the government implemented the initial stages of lockdown the prevailing consensus was that while waves of transmission were unavoidable, an opportunity to ramp up health-care facilities was needed.
By that reasoning, the capacity of primary health-care facilities to deal with the minor cases of infections was going to be the focus. Increasing capacity at those facilities would ease the burden of minor cases in the larger facilities, but also enable them to scale up their capacity to deal with serious cases. As it turned out, that’s not exactly what materialised.
The Gauteng health department, faced with the largest population of all the provinces, indicated that it would need a new, temporary facility, which was duly built at Nasrec. Common sense — at least the public’s understanding thereof — implied that such a facility would remain active for the duration of the pandemic, or at the very least until we reached herd immunity, as articulated by the ministerial advisory committee. Yet quite remarkably, as the infection waves subsided — as waves tend to — the province decided the facility was no longer necessary.
When the truncated nature of the vaccination programme became obvious, while the data indicated the inevitability of a third wave, common sense again implied that the province would be planning ahead of the wave by either revisiting the idea of a temporary facility or ensuring that the capacity of pre-existing facilities was indeed increased — as promised in 2020. Unfortunately, the exact opposite came to pass.
The fire that gutted Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital was a setback that no-one could have anticipated. However, the response to the tragedy was something no-one could justify. Between realising that no-one had the plans for the facility — thanks to the apartheid government — and no-one was available who could master project management during a crisis, the provincial government has found itself languishing at the epicentre of the crisis.
Moving the whole country to level 4 lockdown for 14 days plunges us not only into a health-care crisis but an economic one, particularly for workers in the tourism and entertainment sectors. Our tragedy is now that so many errors and missteps have been evident in the past year that we have lost the ability to even assess the effectiveness of what is being done. As a result, we are simply meandering through a crisis informed not by strategy and common sense but by faith that things will eventually come right.
The sense of universal discontent — from the vaccinated and the load-shed alike — is a real indictment of the quality of our leadership.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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