This week the EFF’s game of political optics entered its latest episode of mass mobilisation. A few weeks earlier the party had announced its call for a national shutdown, premised on two issues — one legitimate and the other fanciful.
The energy crisis, which has condemned the country to eternal rolling blackouts and continues to shed a significant slice of economic output, is an issue that resonates with all South Africans.
Over the past year as load-shedding has become more endemic and solutions more elusive, the collective sense of frustration has become a unifying feature of the nation. The deep-seated issues affecting load-shedding, from poor power station performance to boardroom dramas, have been well ventilated. What has been less clear to understand is the pathway to solutions.
Over the past year the government has put together an energy crisis committee, which has now been supplemented by the creation of a ministry of electricity. In addition, Business For SA has adopted the Solidarity Fund template and created a new resource mobilisation forum, whose mandate is to provide financial and technical support to the energy committee.
Unfortunately, after 15 years of load-shedding such steps are largely seen as tentative, and in light of the persistence of darkness have not done much to address public frustration. Any organisation that seeks to mobilise citizens to express frustration about load-shedding therefore resonates with the public. That element of the EFF’s shutdown agenda found its sense of legitimacy in the darkest of our times.
The second element of the shutdown agenda — the call for President Cyril Ramaphosa to vacate office — was an exercise in fanciful political pugilism that had little chance of mobilising citizens. The reality is that until we know otherwise, we have to acknowledge that the ANC’s political strength resulted in it garnering more than 10-million votes compared with the EFF’s 1.8-million in the most recent general election.
The stark difference indicates that the ANC still commands the attention and support of the most significant parts of the electorate. Its choice of president is a democratic process that might have its limitations but cannot be faulted for its ability to reflect the will of ANC voters.
The call for the removal of an ANC president by an opposition party has the unintended consequence of alienating citizens whose frustration with load-shedding is as strong as their sense of loyalty to the ANC, or even the appreciation of the democratic processes underpinning the election of leaders in SA. Those alienated citizens would then opt out of participating in a shutdown.
The additional challenge imposed by the EFF upon itself was the choice of a “hanging” Monday as the date of the “shutdown”, falling between the weekend and a public holiday. Given South Africans’ tendency to convert such hanging Mondays to leave days, it is impossible to provide a scientific conclusion on the success or otherwise of the shutdown. However, the numbers seen on the streets were far fewer than the EFF would have wished for, and hence in the game of the optics of mass mobilisation the protest was not exactly successful.
But it is in the optics of coincidences where the country should remain ill at ease. Whether it is mere coincidence or not, load-shedding was suspended for the first time in months ahead of the protest. The old epithets — that usage is lower during holidays — have long been abandoned as load-shedding has remained at elevated levels during weekends and even the holiday season.
This turn of events unfortunately creates a credibility crisis where South Africans will wonder how Eskom was suddenly able to achieve what we had started to believe was the impossible. If the move towards easing load-shedding was a political rather than an engineering miracle, we should be acutely concerned about what it all means.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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