Our commander-in-chief will jet off to Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, which takes place this week. He leaves a trail of doom at home.
President Cyril Ramaphosa does well at events like Davos. His counterparts say “he does a good Davos”, meaning he talks a good game.
At home, we have to deal with routine power cuts. I see people exclaiming on social media that stage 6 is the new normal, a sign of denial. We are like Nigeria, with its regular, predictable power outages.
Thanks must go to the ANC for destroying critical components of our economic infrastructure. It pretends that state capture and the Zuptas are responsible for the sorry mess at Eskom. That’s only partly true.
State capture occurred only because the ANC was vulnerable to it, having weakened the state to such an extent that the Zuptas could walk in and do as they pleased. And it has no solution to the problem.
Last month, 4,500 delegates at the ANC Nasrec conference discussed moving Eskom to the department of mineral resources & energy, away from the department of public enterprises. That decision will help clarify accountability lines but not the entity’s performance.
There are marginal differences in the capacity of the two departments. The DPE cannot oversee Eskom. Its energy unit has been understaffed for almost a decade.
Meanwhile, the DMRE needs help to update the Integrated Resource Plan of 2019. If it is unable to edit a document on time, it will struggle when it inherits a broken institution like Eskom. It may develop technocratic capacity to oversee the utility, considering the engineering background of its director-general Jacob Mbele, appointed last year, but technocratic capacity is only half the story. South Africa is broken because of its political layer.
This was the finding of the National Planning Commission’s diagnostic report of 2012, which led to the National Development Plan’s remedies. Chapter 13 of the NDP cuts to the heart of what needs to be done to free the state from interfering politicians.
But the diagnostic report and the NDP fail to deal with the real issue: that the ANC is strangling the state and, therefore, the economy.
You will see how it will struggle to appoint a new CEO for Eskom. The board interviewed outgoing André de Ruyter, but the ministers then imposed themselves on the process and questioned him. This duplication was an anomaly. His name was then taken to the ANC’s deployment committee, which has the unofficial right of veto. Cabinet had the final say.
Eskom’s spending capacity is attractive to the business world, and various politicians will use the opportunity to interfere in the appointment process.
Ramaphosa needs help with decision-making and implementation. It is only natural that moving Eskom to the energy portfolio will take several months to effect. So will the process to hire a replacement for De Ruyter.
In the meanwhile, Transnet is unravelling and is already seen within the government as the “next Eskom”. Transnet’s debt profile should have been prioritised in 2019 when this administration’s term began. Alongside Sanral’s bond, Transnet’s debt cliff was already apparent.
But the government focused on the collapse of SAA and failed to give attention to debt crises at entities such as the Land Bank.
Only the National Treasury is able to give a credible account of state debt. The other departments are hopeless.
That Transnet is teetering on the brink of default may show that the Treasury’s stature in government circles has diminished. This week, the Minerals Council took the unusual step of calling for the removal of Transnet CEO Portia Derby and Transnet Freight Rail CEO Siza Mzimela.
Its call is a sign of desperation in the mining industry, which has been screaming about the state of rail infrastructure on various platforms. Despite the mining boom of recent years, mining companies’ annual results reports have consistently flagged rail infrastructure struggles.
Instead, the government has looked at the aggregate numbers and how that helped both the overall economic picture and corporate taxes. It has ignored the fact that resources companies needed to transport more of their products to international markets.
De Ruyter and Derby were the signature appointments of the New Dawn era. Transnet’s unravelling cannot be attributed to state capture. This is a company that promised to pay a dividend only in 2020 and under Ramamphosa’s watch.
The SOE chaos reveals the distraction within the government and the ANC under Ramaphosa, which considers one department better than another when all the tiers of government are just shells. And much of society claps for these pretend decisions and feigns shock every time stage 6 is announced.
The reality is that the ANC is devoid of plans. What is the alternative, I hear you ask? Propping up the comatose ANC cannot be one.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.