Occasionally commentators accuse South Africans of having short memories. I have likely done it myself, but it is a lazy and inaccurate way to explain the disassociation we see among our friends and colleagues from our many problems.
It is only reasonable that we are blinded by fires that are right in front of us and cannot see what else is burning. We are faced with existential issues, so when somebody wants to worry about climate change it can induce impressive teenager-level eye-rolling.
I mean, look at the kind of stuff we have to deal with. On July 3 electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa went on TV to say that load-shedding was under control and trending in the right direction. “Six weeks ago, it was intensifying stage 6 load-shedding, but now it is 14 to 16 hours of the day with no load-shedding. We are back at stage 3 [and] even that is going to taper down and we will get to a stage where we will not have load-shedding in a 24-hour cycle.”
He said it was “no accident” that the dreaded 34,000MW demand projected by Eskom’s experts had not materialised. “We came nowhere close,” he said. “There is a downward trend that is responsible for us to not have load-shedding for 16 hours per day and stage 3 for eight hours a day. This is by no accident.”
On the 12th July — just over a week later — Eskom shed 6,432MW while running 15 diesel-powered emergency open-cycle gas turbines, seeking to make up the more than 7,300MW supply gap. The utility couldn’t manage more than 26,699MW, and demand peaked at more than 34,000MW. Stage 8 loomed perilously close.
Not because we have short memories, in fact, but maybe because people are tired of the minister’s predilection for public relations, he completely got away with this exhibition of his limitations. Surely, he wouldn’t have painted such a rosy picture if he had known how vulnerable the whole system is, and surely he should know by now how good Eskom’s projections are?
When elevated levels of load-shedding first became reality as opposed to being a terrifying prospect that would lay waste to our economy and condemn millions of people to squalor and penury, we were up in arms. We warned of “frightening consequences in hospitals, schools and offices” in an editorial. “It will hit food prices, the cold chain, agriculture, and food security. The knock-on effects of power cuts on the currency, inflation, interest rates, GDP and employment are already clear,” we wrote.
This weekend, as we recover from another bout of stage 6 mayhem, there’s scarcely a squeak.
News fatigue
News fatigue and crisis fatigue is something we discuss in the newsroom. How do we cater for readers who are overwhelmed by news and information in general, and bad, sometimes traumatic news in particular? According to researchers, crisis fatigue is when people handle rolling crises by disengaging completely. Such crises might look like “wars, political instability, economic depression, pandemics, natural disasters or racial injustice” — and it seems we have had the full stack in SA on top of the relentless sense of resistance to progress we feel every day due to Eskom and crime.
Understandably, one crisis that we tend to put on the to-do list is that of climate change. Last week saw several heat records smashed across the world and developed nations struggling to handle variously heatwaves, floods and forest fires. In 2016 Cape Town came within a hair’s breadth of completely running out of water and in 2022 Durban was ravaged by flooding.
Scientists say that you cannot specifically ascribe these individual events to climate change, but that it is reasonable to say that they are considerably more likely as a result of warming global temperatures.
Our government has an embarrassing habit of blaming rich countries for climate change despite our own starring role in historical emissions. But the blame game is really a distraction — especially in our case, as rich countries are desperate to hand over a pot of cash for climate mitigation technologies and energy transition (the Just Economic Transition Investment Plan) save for the fact that we can’t work out to how to spend it.
When it comes to environmental disaster, our almost complete lack of preparedness is way down our list of stuff to worry about. Last week Solly Msimanga, leader of the opposition in the Gauteng legislature, wrote to Business Day about the Gauteng Provincial Disaster Management Centre. “Desks stand empty, and no manager is on site to ensure the centre operates efficiently,” he said.
This won’t get too much attention until the flood or the drought arrives — but it is increasingly likely that it will arrive. It is worth recalling that Cape Town survived the drought partially because of the high level of experience in the city’s water and sanitation department at the time, and because of a popular mayor who could rally social cohesion around behaviour change. Gauteng residents will have to decide for themselves how prepared they think local authorities are.
I’m afraid we do need to expend of our denuded stock of worry on climate change. The government’s dilly-dallying around the Just Economic Transition Investment Plan deal and sulky and embarrassingly hypocritical blame game around carbon emissions will not stop the crisis when it comes. Planning will.
* I missed the rugby live on Saturday. Later, noting that SA Twitter’s discussion was once again more about the referee’s performance than the players, it was quickly apparent that the Boks had lost. There was little need to see the score. Springbok fans need to learn to lose better.
• Parker is Business Day editor in chief.
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