TESSA DOOMS | Energy problems threaten to plunge SA into uncontrollable crisis of anger

On April 10 2008, Eskom, SA’s state-owned energy company, released the first national and mandatory ‘Load shedding’ schedule.

Load shedding, then a relatively unknown term is a technical term invented by ANC politicians and technocrats for regular and predetermined rolling electricity blackouts. What was being disguised, in clever English, as a strategic approach to manage an energy crisis that had been looming for almost a decade already, load shedding was and continues to be electricity rationing. A stop gap measure that provides temporary relief to an energy grid not designed to handle the needs of the population it serves, literally crumbling in the hands of poor policy decisions and even worse management.

April 2008 was not SA’s first experience of load shedding. As far back as 2006, regional load shedding was undertaken in parts of the country. By October 2007, national load shedding was introduced. The rationale of rotating access was that people could plan around the times that they would not have electricity to lessen the impact of the blackouts. However, this rationale falls flat when in January 2023, 17 years after load shedding started, SA went almost a week with Stage 6 load shedding that cut electricity for 10-12 hours a day. No amount of planning can soften its impact. As South Africans watch their food rot in their fridges, turn customers away from their small businesses and learn of deaths of loved ones in hospitals because life-saving machines were not available at critical times There is simply no way for individuals, families and businesses to heed calls to be patient and do their part in saving electricity while their lives fall apart.

In December 2007, then president Thabo Mbeki made his first public apology for load shedding.

“Eskom was right. Government was wrong”, he conceded to a room filled with business executives. This concession was a reference to the reports and warnings from Eskom dating back to 1998, sounding an alarm that the country's electricity infrastructure, much of it designed for a divided and unequal country during the dark days of apartheid, was insufficient for the need of current and future populations. Ominously, reports went as far as accurately predicting that the crisis would hit in 2007. The ANC government ignored these warnings until it was clearly too late.

South Africans have become accustomed to going to sleep under one load shedding schedule, and waking up to a dramatically different schedule in the morning. Planning becomes redundant, fuels anxieties and frustration. A president that cancels international working trips at the last minute, as if he did not know that the country has been plunged into darkness for months before.

There is no accountability for the Eskom crisis. A crisis birthed out of years of poor government decisions, corruption and mismanagement that has resulted in Medupi and Kusile power stations still incomplete almost a decade after they were commissioned and reports of sabotage by companies still being paid to deliver coal and other services. 

When SA was faced with Covid-19, a crisis that was not of their making, they were at minimum willing to stand before the nation, providing regular updates. Even that low bar is too high for them when facing a crisis that, similarly to Covid-19, is endangering lives and livelihoods. The difference is that the ANC government knows that its deployees into government and into Eskom have a lot to answer to for this crisis. Ramaphosa was the head of the Eskom war room during the Jacob Zuma administration. Many ministers in his cabinet have been part of previous cabinets as Eskom suffered the instability of 10 different board chairpersons and 15 CEOs in the last 23 years.

The scale of the electricity crisis is undoubtedly grand and the issues complex, but this is not a crisis that will only be solved by service delivery. Without transparency and accountability from the ANC, the President, his administration and Eskom we will continue to brew an even bigger crisis of public discontent. A crisis of anger, frustration and impatience that will not only spill over into the streets in protest but further break the already tenuous social contract causing people to care less about the consequences of their actions on society. South African who have been patient for almost two decades for a resolution to this crisis, deserve more than a short-term turnaround plan that signals no end in sight for loadshedding, even beyond 2024.