ALEXANDER PARKER: It’s decision time, Mr President, so get the vested interests out of the room

Anybody who watches how our president operates will see that he has a consultative bent, to say the least. He rings around, he canvasses, and he creates committees and advisory panels. “Extensive consultative process” has become a mantra that seems to touch everything and anything the president does.  

In doing so the presidency has become a centre of gravity that sucks into its milieu many of the biggest brains in the country. These experts become part of the growing army of presidential advisers, consultants and confidantes.

As nice as this might feel — and as good as it looks on a CV — it often means these folk never speak their minds publicly again. Others continue to speak, but are careful when they do for risk of upsetting their special relationship with the presidency.  

The result of drawing so many people into his inner circle is that the president has diminished the richness of debate on critical national topics. I doubt this was by design, but what we are seeing is that many of the smartest minds are confined to having important policy debates behind closed doors — and everyone is worse off for it.

The rolling energy crisis is a clear example. Much like during the Covid pandemic, the past several weeks have seen a proliferation of “expert” commentators on the energy crisis who present simple analysis and solutions to an enormously complex and highly technical policy debate.

To be fair to the president, though, I do see his problem. As a lay person, and as a newspaper editor, in some ways I have the same problem. In trying to discern the truth I need to navigate through the great wall of overconfident commentators who think the solutions are simple and everyone in the government is an idiot.

While some certainly are, this is unhelpful. Having passed that, one is faced with an almost impassable jungle of technical misunderstandings — the baseload numpties, the just-build-solar clowns and the nuclear nuts. 

In this technical milieu there are any number of special and vested interest groups. There are those whose personal fortunes are tied to a particular technology. There are those who represent financiers who see opportunities, and there are the many consultants, lawyers and dealmakers who will advise them — and make money doing so — irrespective of whether a solution is ever implemented.

There are the business lobbyists who are more concerned about immediate supply solutions than costs, and who have little thought for the domestic consumer. And, finally, there are the environmentalists, who often put ideology before pragmatism.

Should you ever get through that, the final challenge is overcoming the sea of naivete. I will bow to accusations of cynicism, but I think the people who believe fixing Medupi and Kusile is part of the solution to our problems are naive. I just don’t think they will ever work properly, and realistic scenario planning needs to accept this. 

Energy crisis

Incredibly, there are people out there who continue to forget about the politics. This is a political mess too, and unfortunately you’re going to need politicians to fix that. There is a single reason at the heart of our government’s inability to accept billions of dollars in next-to-free money from international partners to fix our energy crisis — the president’s inability to bat back the interest groups that still haven’t finished fighting it out.

There are those who think that the various ministers all act in good faith and that one of them in particular will suddenly throw off his 1950s ideological straitjacket to move quickly, and engage as though some of them are not corrupt. Why, when we know they are?

As Business Day revealed last week, Eskom’s Mpumalanga coal procurement processes and coal-fired plants are a giant crime scene. The scale of the vandalism and extortion is becoming clearer, and the clearer it becomes the more visible the scale of the policing crisis is too. This needs to be fed into the energy crisis solutions matrix.

Finally, people seem to forget about the debt. It’s still there and while there is a lot of talk about the political will to deal with R200bn of it, this discussion appears to happen in parallel with the technical solutions.

Therefore, on the advisory front the president’s challenge is to find the unicorn, somebody not afflicted with the above issues, not attached to the needs of any stakeholder and not in a special interest group, be they at his cabinet table, advising a bank, betting the farm on solar, trashing a generator in Mpumalanga, hoping to hustle through a corrupt deal on gas powerships, or worried about climate change.

All of these people ultimately need to be separated from the decision-making moments, and there should be a single person whose job it is to take all of this noise into account, and to make the decision.

Once the special interest groups have been heard they all need to leave the room. Then, there is one man standing. His name is Cyril Ramaphosa and, as much as he craves the security of a crowd, he alone must lead.

• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.