Turf out the ANC liars

I’ve been wondering what the point is of blackouts during off-peak times. Never mind that it isn’t the slot I was told to expect, but why would my power need go out between 9pm and 11pm on Monday? Surely demand can’t be that high so late at night? Why get outages between 10am and 3pm? Peak times are mornings and evenings, not so?

So to answer the question, I’ve watched the power usage charts over at Power Alert for a few days. Here’s what I see:

This represents national power usage. Brown indicates critical levels. What can one conclude from this? One shouldn’t presume that the chart is drawn to scale. But it does show that power usage is constantly at critical levels, not only during peak usage times, but all day from 7am to 11pm.

And what does that tell us? That this problem isn’t new and sudden. That it’s been brewing for a considerable time. Eskom may claim unscheduled service outages at power stations, but that’s because, by Eskom’s own admission, it is running them as hard as possible.

And from that, we can conclude that when Thabo Mbeki told us in May 2006 that “there is no crisis”, noting that supply (37GW plus 2GW peak capacity) exceeded projected demand (35GW), he was lying. Don’t tell me he didn’t read the reports. He has apologised, yes, but for what? For being wrong? Sure, the government was wrong, but as Andrew Kenny writes at Fin24.co.za, it had no excuse for being wrong. He knew what economic growth was. He knew what Eskom’s supply and demand projections were. Anyone with grade-four arithmetic could figure out we were headed for a crisis, even then.

The idea that private-sector companies would build generation plants without being able to price their product for a reasonable return on investment was self-delusion, and to sell the idea, Mbeki and his ministers simply lied to us. (Aside: Kenny makes a good point about Alec Erwin. He may believe a hammer and a sickle are the tools of the economist’s trade, but he wasn’t in charge of public enterprises in the 1990s when this half-baked plan was cooked up.)

“Whatever needs to be done to make sure that the economy grows and new investors come into the economy is being done on the energy and other sides,” he said at the time. Lies.

“The Honourable Member is proceeding from the wrong assumption that our government has failed to meet South Africa’s electricity capacity needs,” he told an opposition parliamentarian. Lies.

Erwin and Mbeki have played down the impact of the blackouts (reported Fin24.co.za in August 2006), saying the outages would not affect investment and would not derail efforts to lift economic growth to 6% from below 5% now. Lies.

In May 2006, after the first blackouts hit Cape Town, Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu told Donovan Jackson, writing for Mining and Manufacturing Systems Magazine: “Your assertion that planning did not anticipate the demand is not correct … The recent events in the Cape are not (and should not be seen as) an indication that South Africa has run out of capacity and therefore cannot meet the demand.” He added that the problem was impossible to foresee. Lies.

“I don’t think we are facing a crisis; we firmly believe the long-term plans make it very comfortable for us to meet our needs,” said the Deputy Director General of Minerals and Energy Affairs, Nelisiwe Magubane, in February 2006. Lies.

In January 2007, the office of Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin told Reuters in a statement that he was “confident that South Africa as a whole will not be plunged into darkness”. Lies.

“We don’t believe there is a crisis in the energy sector in South Africa. There are challenges that don’t amount to a crisis,” said Sandile Nogxina, Director General of Minerals and Energy, in June 2007. Lies.

So what about the other promises? Healthcare? As a surgeon in Nelspruit pointed out in a blog post, that’s a lie too.

Gautrain? Well, we’ll see about that. The tunnel-boring machines hired at huge expense don’t work too well without power either.

Without any shame, without any loyalty to the people that elected them, the ANC government, from Mbeki on down, simply lied to us to cover up its own failures.

So where is the truth in all this? Well, Mbeki did tell an election rally (reports Reuters) that providing these basic services was “central” to maintaining freedom. And that much is true.

But isn’t that anti-campaigning? “Failure is not an option. We failed. Vote for us.” Huh?

Why on earth would anyone still believe that the ANC can deliver basic services? Why would they think, as Richard Catto apparently does, that merely electing a more populist leader for the same party of central planning, national socialism and crony capitalism will make all the difference? At best that leader, Jacob Zuma, has shown a singular inability to manage just his personal affairs. What would make him any better at planning government service delivery?

Has anyone been held responsible? Has anyone been fired for incompetence, for lying, for failure to deliver? Is that really what happened to Mbeki in Polokwane last month? I don’t think so. Do you think anyone will be fired? I don’t think so. Will the ANC, which is the source, as ruling party, for the policies the president implements, take responsibility? I don’t think so. And even if they say they do, can we believe them? I don’t think so.

Isn’t it time to fire the liars, for a start, and then revisit the notion that the government is capable of delivering services? Isn’t it time to rely on the energy, innovation and hard work of ordinary South Africans to make a better life for themselves? Ordinary South Africans earned their own liberation. They got together, across party lines, to overthrow apartheid. Isn’t it time to look beyond struggle credentials and loyalty to the ANC, and look to a future in which South Africans can reasonably expect to prosper?

We may already have missed a window of opportunity, in terms of global economic health. Now we can’t even afford the economic growth we need, lest we run out of energy to fuel it. Isn’t it time we, ordinary South Africans, do something about the government that, since liberation, not only failed us, but also lied about it to our faces?

The ANC’s slogan of “a better life for all” is clearly an empty promise. What is a democracy to do other than turf the useless liars out?

(First published on my own blog.)