COMMENT
Lights out
S
Tarren Bolton
[email protected]
www.plantonline.co.za
ay what you like about South
Africans, nothing beats our wicked
sense of humour. Despite our
challenges as a nation, we can all have a
good laugh at our own expense,
irrespective of class, race, or language.
It’s our passive-aggressive way of
dealing with adversity, controversy, and
hardship — it’s a salve for our collective
souls, a release of tension, and a great
way to just get on with it.
At the time of writing, social media is
abuzz with opinion on the Eskom debacle
and resulting load-shedding. Twitter users
have been laughing at themselves in
the dark, tweeting things like, “The nice
thing about Jo’burg weather right now is
that you can see electricity in the sky, but
you can’t have it in your house. It’s quite
cool in a medieval sort of way …” or
“Today I chilled with my family because
there was load-shedding. They’re not bad
people.”
And we all chuckle and chuckle at this
dark sense of humour while President
Cyril Ramaphosa’s words from his
recent State of the Nation Address have
barely settled: “A year ago, [government]
set out on a path of growth and renewal.
Emerging from a period of uncertainty
and a loss of confidence and trust, we
resolved to break with all that divides
us, to embrace all that unites us. We
resolved to cure our country of the
corrosive effects of corruption and to
restore the integrity of our institutions,”
he said.
We surely can’t envy him the
challenge of having to ‘put right’ and
restore what is essentially an inherited
mess. Bottom line, Eskom’s operating
costs are quite simply too high; it owes
over R400-billion and does not generate
enough cash to pay even the interest
on that debt. Its decision to raise and
nurture evil twins Medupi and Kusile —
two of the biggest coal-fired generating
plants in the world — is possibly the
single largest disaster in South Africa’s
economic history. Truth is, there is no
painless way for South Africans to deal
with our Eskom crisis, and let’s face
it, load-shedding is the least of our
problems.
A far greater concern is the resulting
threat to investment. In his speech,
President Ramaphosa reported that
the inaugural South Africa Investment
Conference in October last year
provided great impetus to government’s
drive to mobilise R1.2-trillion in
investment over the next five years.
“The Investment Conference attracted
around R300-billion in investment
pledges from South African and
international companies, and there was
also a significant increase in foreign
direct investment last year,” he said,
adding, “Official data shows that just
in the first three quarters of 2018,
there was an inflow of R70-billion — a
phenomenal achievement compared
to the low level of investment in
previous years.” President Ramaphosa
gave the assurance that, to prove that
government’s investment conference
was not just a talk shop where empty
promises were made, currently,
projects to the value of R187-billion
are being implemented, and projects
worth another R26-billion are in pre-
implementation phase. Now that’s all
fine and well, but just how attractive is
any kind of investment looking in the
face of our Eskom crisis?
Another major focus of President
Ramaphosa’s address was how
government has focused efforts on
reigniting growth and creating jobs.
“We have worked together — as
government, labour, business, civil
society, and communities — to remove
the constraints to inclusive growth
and to pursue far greater levels of
investment,” said the president. And
he assured South Africans that the
levels of growth that we need to make
significant gains in job creation will
not be possible without massive new
investment. We can only hope that this
will indeed happen — and we all need
to cling to that belief; that the lights will
not go out on our optimism and there
is always the glimmer of hope. We will
embrace our challenges and remain
positive. After all, it’s the South African
way — and it will take a lot for South
Africans to have a sense-of-humour
failure.
MARCH 2019
1