Sheba, the tiger that prowled around the south of Johannesburg early this week and was eventually shot dead, was Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral resources and energy, went the joke. We laugh even in dark times, being South African.
I thought the prowling predator was looking for Prof Anton Eberhard after he wrote a stinging piece in the Sunday Times.
“It would be a grave mistake to shift the governance of Eskom to the department of mineral resources & energy (DMRE), as recently proposed by the ANC’s national conference. The consequence will almost certainly be ongoing power cuts as Eskom is protected at the expense of private investment,” Eberhard wrote last week.
Being an equal-opportunity offender, Eberhard wrote another opinion piece published by Business Day on Monday criticising public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan’s oversight of Eskom and the little progress made in restructuring it after four years.
Eberhard is one of the people Ramaphosa pulled closer in 2018, asking him to chair the Eskom sustainability task team. In 2018, we had never seen stage 6 power cuts, which we experienced for the first time a year later.
People of this calibre would be in Ramaphosa's cabinet if he was really in charge of the ANC and was not scared of his colleagues in the party
Committees like Eberhard’s abound in government. Every time Ramaphosa is in trouble, he finds a high-profile person to chair some committee. That saviour in a suit will invariably struggle to get a brief, and no-one will know what the animal is meant to do.
Eventually, they will have to find their way in the dark.
Last year, it was businessman Sipho Nkosi who was named as our red-tape tsar. I doubt he knows today what exactly Ramaphosa had in mind when he made the grand announcement during the state of the nation address in February.
Another is the presidential climate finance task team’s Daniel Mminele.
People of the calibre of these three gentlemen would be in Ramaphosa’s cabinet if he was really in charge of the ANC and was not scared of his colleagues in the party.
Because he has not asserted himself and brought in new talent, he creates quasi-roles that are not well thought-out. And the real owners of the ANC, the politicians in the official cabinet, go through the likes of Eberhard, Mminele and Nkosi like a tiger goes through prey.
They are rapacious in protecting their territory, and ideology is their only stock in trade. They talk about building a more extensive state and elbowing the private sector out. They see foreign funding of any kind as suspicious.
The free or cheap money Mminele is capable of bringing in will be blocked at the border because the dominant politicians see it as the “West trying to buy us”, or something like that.
In its wisdom, the ANC thinks the department being overseen by Mantashe should take charge of Eskom. That decision causes more confusion than anything. Improving Eskom’s performance is important, but it’s not our real problem.
We have an energy crisis, while Eskom may be beyond repair. Public policy must look beyond fixing Eskom, as crucial as that is.
The ANC is not able to see out of the maze. Any chance of a better interrogation of the sorry mess will come if it falls below 50% in next year’s elections. A cunning coalition partner would demand to run the energy portfolio in return for pushing Ramaphosa back to the Union Buildings.
That way, we can slowly unburden him and his ANC of the duty to lead South Africa, which is too big for him, his party or any of the opposition parties to run alone.
That set-up would be like tranquillising the ANC, so it sinks into oblivion eventually, around 2029.
In the intervening period, stage 6 will be our friend, as there are no quick fixes for our crises. The energy problem is bad as we all feel it immediately and dramatically. It is like the Gupta capture under Zuma.
But the energy crisis is not our biggest problem, never mind that it is thrust in our faces every time the power is cut. Granted, energy shortages throttle the economy, but they are not the sole or primary cause — they are symbolic of the broader decay under ANC rule.
Thanks to the ANC, we are a failing economy. It is only because of the smarts around our economic infrastructure and public institutions, the nature of our private sector and capital markets, that we are not like Zimbabwe yet, or a failed state.
We are a strong democracy that needs to rise to the challenge of meting out to the ANC its future in the next couple of years.
What will Ramaphosa do when we get stage 6 as he prepares to deliver the state of the nation address on February 9? Order more diesel to keep the lights on?
That is the only thing he can realistically do in the short term, besides appointing the likes of Eberhard to operate at the extreme edges of our political cesspit.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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