Kaizer’s Musing

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Among the many problems confronting our country, by far the most pressing one must be our unreliable electricity supply, which has a ripple effect across the economy. The power outages which now take place routinely at least twice daily wreak so much havoc in the lives of everybody in the country, both directly and indirectly. Nobody – and nothing – is left untouched by the frequent bouts of load shedding.

It is a truism that, in order to stand a chance of being internationally competitive, an economy requires reliable – and ideally affordable – electricity supply, among other important factors. After all, it was thanks to the bountiful supply of such cheap electricity, for instance, in combination with other steps taken by the apartheid government to protect local business, that the economy performed so well in the period after the Second World War, well until the international community could no longer stand the odious stench of apartheid in the mid-1980s and was finally persuaded to isolate the country politically and economically.

Load shedding, therefore, must be our number one enemy. At a time when we desperately need to grow the economy in order to make a dent in unemployment so that we may avert potentially devastating social mayhem in years to come, load shedding strikes a telling blow on the economy. Consequently, not only do local businesses find themselves in a situation where they have to downsize, downscale or even to cease to exist, but multinational companies may place their growth plans on hold or relocate to other countries, and potential investors may shun South Africa as an investment destination.

With poor leadership being the only thing which eclipses load shedding as the most serious challenge facing South Africa (after all, the power outages that we experience from Eskom are themselves a direct result of the poor leadership to which our country has been subjected by the governing ANC over the years), ending load shedding must, therefore, be our number one priority. In perhaps more cohesive countries, load shedding would have seen the country’s best minds getting together, across the political divide, in search of a solution to so serious a problem.

Sadly, that is not the case in our country – or so it appears, judging by the different pronouncements and opportunistic postures taken by some important stakeholders on the matter. Some see the crisis presented by load shedding as an opportunity for political grandstanding, while others in the governing party continue to stick their heads in the sand by denying both their culpability for the situation that we find ourselves in and the debilitating nature of the challenge. Instead of a sense of urgency and a single-minded determination to extricate South Africa from this load-shedding crisis, we continue to dither, to argue and to point fingers, as is our wont.

Some, including in very high office, cannot resist the temptation to use the Eskom crisis for public relations purposes in an effort to improve their fortunes in the crucial 2024 elections. So, instead of vision and decisive leadership, what we have is myopia and narcissism.

What should we be doing, instead? We need to recognise that an immediate solution to the load-shedding crisis is our number-one priority as a country. Time is not on our side. We do not have the luxury of another week, let alone another month or another year, within which to survive load shedding. It is such a dangerous enemy which must be vanquished as a matter of extreme urgency.

That should mean that, as a country, we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to procure whatever watt of electricity that we can get for the national grid, in addition to ensuring that whatever work is going on to repair as many of our power stations and to bring them back on stream is expedited. We should seek out the best skills available anywhere in the world to help us to end the load-shedding crisis.

While we do everything possible to solve the problem, in the meantime the Government should provide Eskom with the money required to procure diesel for electricity generation through the use of the utility’s open-cycle gas turbines. Granted, diesel is expensive and that would be money for which no budgetary provision has been made, but load shedding is far costlier to the economy and has a more devastating effect on the country. It must be treated like the number-one enemy that it is.

During normal times, it would make sense that environmental concerns would have to be factored into our decision-making on this and any other front. After all, global warming is a reality and, working in concert with other nations, we must play our part to mitigate it. However, during this moment of crisis, we should not be constrained from fighting load shedding by concerns about the potential impact of some of the proposed solutions on the environment. While they also profess commitment to the global environment agreements, European countries which have found themselves facing near-identical challenges because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine have not allowed themselves to be similarly constrained.

That would be like saying, to a famished, indigent person who faces death because of hunger, that they should not eat pap, bread or whatever because it is not healthy enough for them, but should wait until something that is good for their bodies is available. That person’s death, on account of hunger, would be on our consciences. Instead, it would be far better for such a person to eat anything that would enable them to face yet another day.

There is absolutely no reason, therefore, why South Africa cannot take immediate advantage of the Turkish karpowerships deal to generate power to feed into the national grid to reduce the extent of the daily power outages. Everybody, including enthusiastic environmentalists, must recognise that we find ourselves in a serious crisis and that we must do everything possible to ameliorate or end it.

A Chartered Director, Dr Kaizer Nyatsumba is a turnaround strategy expert, Managing Director of KMN Consulting and the author of Successfully Implementing Turnaround Strategies in State-Owned Companies.