Rulings hamper Eskom recovery as municipalities evade accountability
Your editorial opinion (“Municipal debt threatens Eskom’s unbundling progress”, August 5) refers.
Without the issue of defaulting municipalities dealt with, none of the delayed restructuring plans to create an independent transmission company will stand. We collectively have short and selective memories.
This issue was well surfaced during the André De Ruyter era, with Eskom moving aggressively to reduce or cut bulk supplies to defaulters. The fight-back wound up at the Constitutional Court in 2022 and the decision, penned by justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga nogal, said Eskom couldn’t do it because some residents who did pay also then suffered.
The defaulting debt was R45bn at that time. De Ruyter and others all said then that this simply meant the can was being kicked down the road and that it would eventually likely stall or scupper the restructuring plans. Well...?
Much has been written about Eskom’s turnaround, almost none of it honest, and at its core it has simply no idea what to do about this. The defaulting municipalities, pretty much exclusively ANC ones, simply collect payments from a shrinking core of middle-class residents and businesses and pocket the money, knowing full well that the Constitutional Court decision protects them.
This is the actual story. Yes, there are new court challenges and payment plans and Treasury threats, but none of it seems to help much.
Martin Neethling
Via Business Day online
Constitutional failures weaken anti-corruption fight and policing reforms
It has been reported that the acting minister of police, Firoz Cachalia, has baulked at broadening the powers of the municipal police of Cape Town by raising what he alleges is the unconstitutionality of the proposals long punted by the administration of the city.
This stance is rich, coming as it does from a key player who long served as an MEC in charge of policing in Gauteng and more recently as chair of the National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council. The learned retired law professor surely knows the constitution is not immutable and that in the final analysis it means what the Constitutional Court says it means.
On the latter point, the apex court has ruled that “our law demands a body outside executive control to deal effectively with corruption”. No such body has ever existed in South Africa. Even the Scorpions, a National Prosecuting Authority unit, was not independent.
The concession under oath by Cachalia during his evidence before the ad hoc committee of the National Assembly, which is considering its final report on the complaints made by Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi a year ago to the effect that it was a mistake to disband the Scorpions in 2009, was well made but insufficient.
The failure of the government to comply with the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the constitution (and the resultant legally binding requirement that our anti-corruption machinery of state should be structurally and operationally independent) is unconstitutional given the Glenister case decision quoted above.
It is also an anti-corruption law enforcement disaster given the evidence pouring out at the Madlanga commission. The Investigating Directorate Against Corruption is clearly lacking in independence and is accordingly unconstitutional. But will Cachalia, and the cabinet in which he serves, do anything to rectify this dismal failure?
Paul Hoffman SC
Accountability Now
Artisan shortage narrative crumbles as skilled workers go unrecognised
Merel van der Lei has exposed the absurdity at the heart of South Africa’s supposed artisan shortage: many of the artisans the country claims it cannot find are already working on its factory floors (“The artisans SA says it cannot find are already clocked in”, August 4).
They diagnose faults, repair machinery and keep factories running, yet the state refuses to recognise them as skilled because they lack the correct paperwork. Why should employers need the state to confirm what they can already observe with their own eyes?
Digitising workplace skills may be useful when businesses choose to do it. It should not become another government programme, compulsory database or excuse to preserve the sector education & training authorities (Setas). The answer to a failed bureaucracy is not a better-informed bureaucracy.
Setas should not be reformed yet again. They should be abolished. Employers, industry associations and independent institutions should be free to assess and certify workers according to the skills their industries actually require.
Practical assessments, apprenticeships and competing credentials would give workers portable proof of their abilities without forcing them through costly and irrelevant programmes.
The skills development levy should be returned to businesses and workers. Labour rules that discourage firms from hiring and training inexperienced workers should be removed.
The state assumes skills do not exist until a bureaucracy has measured, classified and certified them. But skills are created through work, recognised through experience and demonstrated through productivity.
The artisans are already clocked in. It is the state’s skills bureaucracy that has failed to show up.
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Cape Town
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