South Africa Will Not Be Enjoying a Bright Christmas

We only have 40% power available — and it’s not because of missiles or drones

The crisis with our electricity utility, Eskom, has escalated to dangerous levels, damaging the nation’s psyche, ruining our fragile economy and the daily lives of stoic citizens who have no choice but to accept this as the new normal.

Most of us can’t afford generators (nor the diesel required to run them), solar installations, or UPS units that can keep essentials running for up to four hours three times a day.

This electrical storm has been threatening for over a decade and is now upon us.

I marvel at how Ukraine perseveres with supplying power to her citizens despite the constant missile and drone attacks on their infrastructure.

“Despite attempts to repair damaged civilian infrastructure, the Ukrainian authorities have been forced to introduce planned power outages to prevent the country’s remaining energy infrastructure from being overloaded. By October 2022, at least 40% of the country’s energy facilities had been seriously damaged. In December, the Ukrainian authorities said over 50% of energy users in the country had seen their electricity supply cut off.” — Amnesty International, 22 December 2022.

Civilians are suffering a nightmare of freezing temperatures, lack of access to heating, water, food, health, and education — yet they endure.

They are fighting in defence of their sovereign country and will not give in to terrorists.

In South Africa, the battle is self-inflicted.

Correction — the ruling party saw the approaching storm years ago and DID NOTHING ABOUT IT except obfuscate and reject the idea of private power producers. Stuck in an obsolete ideology that the state should exert total control of critical infrastructure — for fear of losing power.

Well, the African National Congress is still in power but lost the plot years ago where cadre deployment, Black Economic Empowerment and appointments based on loyalty, not competence, have been the root cause of the demise of our roads, rail networks, port facilities and the most critical component of a country’s economy — electricity.

Eleven different chief executive officers (CEOs) have headed up our power utility, Eskom, since load shedding (rolling power blackouts) began in 2007.

Andre de Ruyter became CEO in January 2020 — the first white to head up the utility since the dawn of our democracy (kleptocracy?) in 1994. His appointment was unpopular with the radical elements in our society — because of the colour of his skin.

(So much for the ANC’s Freedom Charter advocating for non-racialism.)

Let me pause for a moment to reflect that the recruitment firm approached some 27 black executives to apply for the position — they all declined! Who would be crazy enough to take on such a thankless task?

Ingrained corruption during the State Capture years under former President Jacob Zuma, had hollowed out Eskom and Andre de Ruyter believed he could instil clean governance, root out corruption and internal sabotage, and tackle the lack of engineering and technical skills arising out of the exodus of skilled white staff brought about because of the insistence of the ANC that the staff complement reflect the demographics of the population.

Nine months into the job, he realised Eskom’s 90 electricity generation units in its 15 coal-fired power stations were in much worse shape than he had anticipated. The neglect of regular maintenance of units and the time required to repair them properly (months, not days or weeks) would lead to a further decline in the Energy Availability Factor (EAF).

He concluded that without additional generation capacity coming on line with two years, we would have to live with permanent load shedding by 2024. With our abundance of sun and wind, the fastest and cheapest option was renewables.

He said,

“It’s time to beat our coal shovels into windmills.”

He believed the private sector could speed up a renewables build program to give Eskom the space to plan removal of units from the grid to conduct major overhauls, and close the older power stations.

Hang on a minute!

A short explainer before I continue.

Eskom is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) which falls under the Ministry of Public Enterprises. However, the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy also has its fingers in the pie. The minister in charge of the latter is Gwede Mantashe, whose moniker is the fossil fuel minister, and admits to being a coal fundamentalist.

You can understand then why he hates the idea of renewables and only lifted the regulated limit of 10W for private power production to 100W when President Ramaphosa overrode him earlier this year.

(You know, the buffalo man with US dollars hidden in his couch, which were then stolen, at his Phala Phala game farm.)

Fossil fool Mantashe accused de Ruyter of being incompetent shortly after his appointment, and has been gunning for him ever since.

2020 has been the worst year ever for load shedding. Our EAF currently sits at 40%, worse than Ukraine! We have endured continuous daily blackouts since 6 September.

I’ve stopped counting the number of days — there’s no point. I count the number of hours I’ll have power on each day and try to plan my activities around that. Some days we’re off for four-hour stretches three times a day — other days it’s less.

I monitor the Eskom app on my phone every couple of hours to check the schedule for my area. Eskom sometimes gives short notice (like twenty minutes!) of increased levels of load shedding.

It’s not their fault. Often, units down for maintenance are late in returning to service — while others break down at the same time!

Calls for the dismissal of de Ruyter grew louder over the past weeks as load shedding escalated.

Week before last, Mantashe (re-elected Chairman of the ANC at their national elective conference the past weekend) trashed de Ruyter and his management, calling him in effect a traitor.

“Eskom, by not attending to rolling blackouts, is actively agitating for the overthrow of the state.”

He’d also previously claimed Eskom could fix the problems in six months without de Ruyter at the helm and that de Ruyter didn’t have the technical skills to run the utility.

Hello, executive management is there to oversee operations, not pick up a spanner.

Well, Andre de Ruyter called his bluff.

His resignation as CEO of Eskom became public knowledge on 14 December. He will continue at Eskom until March of next year.

He was steering the ship in the right direction and now it will be rudderless. The chief operating officer, Jan Oberholzer, is retiring in April 2023 and Eskom’s general executive for generation, Rhulani Mathebula, also recently resigned from his position and left the utility at the end of November 2022 — he couldn’t handle the pressure.

This is a major blow to our economy.

Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), the country’s largest business organisation, said de Ruyter’s resignation imperils any chances of economic recovery and development. Meanwhile, the Black Business Council had been repeatedly calling for him to resign — blaming him for blackouts.

Anyone with common sense would know that changing the CEO will not resolve the systemic problems.

No previous CEO succeeded — and they were all black. Nobody demanded they resign. Yet a white man who stayed on longer (three years) than his predecessors and was turning things around was a disposable scapegoat for Eskom’s woes which began long before he arrived.

Without political support, de Ruyter made the right choice. He had already received threats to his life because he wanted to stop the looting, sabotage, and corrupt contracts at Eskom.

On the day of the announcement of Andre de Ruyter’s resignation, his WhatsApp profile pic displayed the famous “Man in the Arena” quote from a speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered on 23 April 1910 at the Sorbonne in Paris, a year after he left office as President of the US.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Amen to that!

Considering the attacks on Andre’s integrity and character, I include another extract from Roosevelt’s speech which speaks to the vitriol emanating from certain loudmouths:

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not… of superiority but of weakness.”

I’m grateful it’s summer in the southern hemisphere — though the food in my fridge may not agree!

Let us pray for the people of Ukraine who are enduring a freezing winter.

My prayers are also with readers and writers in the US and Canada as the Arctic winter storm sweeps across your countries, leaving many of you without power.

Please stay safe and warm. I wish you all peace and love during this holiday period.

South Africa will not be enjoying a bright Christmas. Despite our troubles, we leave room for laughter:

Thank you for being here.

More background reading on Eskom: