It’s important, I think, not to close one’s mind to the possibility that new electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa might achieve some success in the job, or that at least during his tenure the scale of Eskom’s load-shedding might diminish because the management and the board of Eskom are able to implement plans they already have to restore more power to the grid.
Ramokgopa faces two hurdles. One is not his fault — he did not appoint himself and the job at hand may be little more than the disparaging “project manager” mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe first said it would be when he heard of it. The second is more difficult. Since being appointed to head the infrastructure unit in the presidency his record has been patchy. Covid complicated things, but while his office would often report success in planned projects under way, the view from outside was different.
PPC, the country’s biggest cement producer, complained often in 2022 that there was little sign of an upswing in infrastructure projects. The banks also complained. Standard Bank reported that almost a quarter of the official 62 strategic infrastructure projects were behind schedule. Many of the 62 would have predated Ramokgoba’s time in the presidency anyway.
And, a few days before his name was read out when President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffled his cabinet on Monday night, he released a 67-page paper titled “SA’s Infrastructure Emergency: An Urgent and Collaborative Intervention”. He signed it “Prof Kgosientsho Sputla Ramokgopa”. How do you know when someone’s a professor…?
Except it wasn’t an intervention at all. It was a plea for one. It was a list of things that still need to be done in the job he was leaving. In all, I counted 82 urgent items left not done or not complete. It struck me a bit like something you might try to shout out if someone pushed you into a swimming pool from behind. You barely have enough time, while you’re still nice and dry, for “bastar...” before you’re in the water and all wet. That list will now wait for someone else to pick up and, probably, ignore or completely rewrite.
It is very ANC. The movement/party has spent its entire existence making declarations, promises or plans like Ramokgopa’s. In the ANC, the PowerPoint presentation is, in fact, the actual work. You’re a hero. More than competent.
Ramokgopa’s first remarks to a journalist after being named electricity minister were that he didn’t have a new plan and he was there to implement Ramaphosa’s energy emergency plan of last July, which Mantashe has allowed to drift. “My job is to develop an implementation strategy for the president’s plan,” the new minister said.
Either that’s another long to-do list loading, like the one he just left behind, or he really can make a difference. He certainly thinks he can. In a long and fascinating interview after his swearing-in on Tuesday he insisted he was going to get his hands dirty.
“Project managers are on the ground,” he said, “I don’t get to only be explained (to) about the problem. I need to experience the problem. What’s going to help me is that I’m an engineer. Engineers are trained to resolve problems so this is my forte. The more technically complex it looks, the more impossible it looks, the greater my appetite... media conferences don’t resolve load-shedding. Going to the plant, that resolves load-shedding.”
I felt momentarily reassured listening to that. I couldn’t help but silently wish him well. It’s not as if we don’t need the help. But then it struck me just how single-minded the entire state is that Eskom is a purely technical problem to be technically resolved. All you have to do, the mantra seems to be, is fix the machines and you’re done with load-shedding.
That surely has to be a stretch. Author and academic Steven Boykey Sidley wrote a wonderful piece on Eskom in Daily Maverick in February 2019. He had just read US investment banker-turned-writer Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk in which he describes the intricacies of government, laid down over tens of decades: of how things are done, from top to bottom.
“These processes are far too numerous to have been documented,” Sidley wrote, “how to get a gate key, how to reorder stationery, how to get a wi-fi password, how to order a business card, how to get an expense reimbursed, where to find a digital file. You ask here and you ask there. And finally, you get to know how to navigate the enterprise and how to do your job.”
What you are doing, he wrote, is “interrogating and ingesting institutional memory”, and it is this thin layer of knowledge that all institutions are built on. And at Eskom it is long gone and can’t be fixed with a wrench or a blowtorch.
Eskom’s energy availability factor (EAF, the percentage of installed plant it can use) has fallen below 50%. Engineers are surprised as it was 70% just, you know, yesterday. But if you look at the EAF since 2009 it has been in decline, through all seven (or is it eight?) CEOs and how many promises and plans.
Financial collapse, we all know, happens slowly and then quickly. What if the same applies to machines?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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