Whatever gripes you may have with SA, the drama is certainly compelling.
Unfortunately, to grow the economy we need the opposite: a boring, reliable and trustworthy government and functional state-owned enterprises. But we’ve got a lot of hard work ahead to get there, and some tough decisions have to be made because of vested interests.
While the ANC’s focus is on its leadership struggles, around the governing party the country is in crisis, which is being severely aggravated by stage 6 load-shedding. Last Wednesday, Eskom reported that it had lost about 20,000MW due to breakdowns, with another 5,000MW on planned maintenance.
How much of the unplanned outages was due to sabotage it did not say. However, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has said that “on average there is a stage or two of load-shedding that can be attributed to these criminal activities”. He is therefore right to focus on this.
Two of the real culprits for the mess our energy sector is in, Brian Molefe and Anoj Singh, appeared in court last month on charges of looting Transnet when they were senior executives there during the state capture era. But they’re still to face charges for their corrupt activities at Eskom, which resulted in many of the current operational issues.
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s recent comments that De Ruyter “must chase the criminals ... He is right about that. But he will not understand that you cannot have 20,000MW of idle units (on the grid)” are particularly irksome in that he has said not a word to condemn acts of sabotage, extortion and theft, which are a major cause of higher stages of load-shedding and cost Eskom at least R4bn a year. Most of government is also alarmingly silent on this extremely serious problem.
It’s a scary thing for the country if its minister ultimately responsible for the provision of energy actually believes that there really are 20,000MW of idle units in the midst of load-shedding. Mantashe has previously made similar claims, and News24 had to point out to him that it’s actually generation capacity that is unavailable due to breakdowns — much of it due to sabotage of plant and coal supplies.
More recently Mantashe made an even more eyebrow-raising claim — that “by not attending to load-shedding, Eskom is agitating to overthrow the government”. Maybe this could be true of the saboteurs and rent-seekers, but the reality is that by not ensuring sufficient generation capacity it is government itself that is primarily responsible for load-shedding.
Eskom has stepped up its efforts to combat criminality and sabotage in recent months precisely because of a lack of support from government. In early October it established a team, including its own investigators, a special police investigation unit and operators from the State Security Agency, to probe suspected sabotage at a number of its power stations.
Since then there have been a spate of arrests, the latest involving a truck driver and his supervisor from a transport company who had swapped the standard grade of coal intended for the Matla Power Station with subgrade coal. This is common practice and the subgrade goal consists of offtake that is supposed to be discarded and often contains rocks and stones that cause severe damage to power station machinery, leading to breakdowns and load-shedding.
Eskom initiatives
While Eskom’s initiatives are making some headway, there are no such successes against the “construction mafia” and crime syndicates operating in other industries, whose activities have also been widely exposed in the media and in the recently released report of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, which ranks SA fifth in Africa in its index of organised crime, and 19th globally. Its report states: “Pervasive corruption exists within many of the different state departments, including at senior levels within the police, prosecution and prison services.”
The threat of the tentacles of the criminal syndicates creeping deeper into our economy is real. On this one issue we need a unified government doing everything it can to repel the threat of becoming a state controlled by criminals. Every cabinet minister should be united in condemning the sabotage and extortion, particularly after trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel estimated the total economic damage at R47bn annually.
To his credit, police minister Bheki Cele did establish multidisciplinary units in early September to address economic sabotage and related crimes. Business Leadership SA (BLSA) hopes not only to see more arrests of the perpetrators themselves but also of the leaders of criminal syndicates. That is a far more difficult task as so many are integrated into state structures. BLSA is willing to provide support where it can to upgrade the state’s capacity to investigate these kinds of crimes.
• Mavuso (@BusiMavuso2) is BLSA CEO.
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