President Cyril Ramaphosa’s notoriously slow-moving in-tray has never smelt as bad as it does now. His health minister, Zweli Mkhize, is ensnared in a corruption scandal that he surely cannot survive. His energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, has given a 20-year power contract to arguably the filthiest form of energy imaginable — gas-fired floating power stations that will park in our ports and pollute air and sea at the same time — and his police commissioner, Khehla Sitole, is firing good senior cops while himself ducking and diving from the law.
It can’t go on, you would think, even though Ramaphosa has a seemingly infinite capacity to stand still in the middle of a firefight and to feign surprise when a loud noise goes off.
As this newspaper has already suggested, he should ask Mkhize to go. Somehow R150m from health department Covid funds has found its way into the hands of an entirely bogus “communications” firm owned by friends, and some of that has found its way back to Mkhize’s own family. His position is untenable.
A new minister can clear out the rest of the troop of officials and advisers most closely responsible for the derisory Covid vaccine procurement and rollout we have been subject to — Barry Schoub (vaccines), Anban Pillay (procurement) and Nicholas Crisp (rollout). We’re the most developed economy performing the most badly in all aspects of our vaccines response.
All we need is an open-age rollout where the elderly are favoured. How hard could that be? None of the aforementioned powerful, remote, unaccountable and aloof elite, fully vaccinated way back and now with little sense of urgency, seem capable of it.
And if the government is seriously proposing, as Ramaphosa implied on TV last Sunday, that it is better to buy Russian and Chinese vaccines untested against our dominant B.1.351 variant, rather than the Novavax product which tested well against it, criminal charges should follow.
As for commissioner Sitole, he has proven an ineffective, unconvincing and now hapless leader. He cannot explain to the courts why he and other senior police officers tried to buy “grabber” phone-call interception technology for a wildly inflated R45m just before the December 2017 ANC conference that Ramaphosa narrowly won.
Sitole was plucked from obscurity and appointed police commissioner by former president Jacob Zuma. That is bad enough. And he may not have been the driving force behind the attempted grabber deal. But he sure as hell isn’t too keen to tell anyone what he knows about it. The courts have been brutal about him and he’s been begging Ramaphosa to meet him so he can explain.
But Ramaphosa’s biggest headache by far is Mantashe, also chair of the ANC and in party battles a Ramaphosa ally. But he is an appalling energy minister, in love with coal and gas and a walking carbon time-bomb for this country.
He has just decided, against all logic, not to allow business to build power plants with a capacity of up to 50MW, capping the maximum at 10MW instead. Hardly anyone will bother trying. Worse, he has turned a tender for the emergency supply of 2,000MW into a scandalous award of more than half of it to a Turkish company which will park three LNG-burning, carbon-emitting “power ships” in local ports and plug into the grid for 20 whole years. Twenty.
The deal absolutely reeks of corruption but, worse, where he could have quickly added renewable power to the grid, Mantashe is directly threatening SA’s access to its big export markets in the EU. Brussels is about to announce it will impose carbon-emissions charges on goods entering its borders from 2026, when the power ships deal is still in its infancy.
The carbon charge will run a little like broad-based BEE could. The EU will want to know from importers how much carbon was generated, right through the manufacturing process, by the production of the steel, cement, fertiliser and aluminium they import — and then it will charge them for it. The process will eventually extend to all imports. EU importers will naturally begin looking for low-carbon suppliers, and we may well not be among of them.
The UK, which literally stops the sale of new cars (not bakkies, yet) with internal combustion engines in 2030 (meaning the Brits stop buying them from, well, tomorrow) and the EU are our biggest export markets for cars and manufactured goods. We are screwed unless we wake up. The president should cancel this foolish power-ship contract and, for both his own good and ours, move this minister to where he can’t do any more economic damage.
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