One of the unfortunate offshoots of this era of disruptive innovations is that each time we are faced with a challenge we want to come across as Silicon Valley types, pretending to be ideating ourselves out of our predicaments. Yet not everything that keeps us up at night, such as crime, or keeps us in the dark like Eskom, requires us to tie ourselves in Clayton Christensen-inspired disruptive knots.
Sometimes all we need is basic competence. At Apple, it’s called operational excellence.
In his address to the South African Communist Party congress this week, President Cyril Ramaphosa implored us to think about establishing another entity to compete with Eskom as we seek to extricate ourselves from the nightmare that is power outages. If you flew at night from the Cape to Musina, he said, you couldn't but marvel at how our land is adorned by lights made possible by one company. “If we look at other countries like China, it has a number of state-owned electricity generating companies that compete among themselves to bring prices down. That is a future that we should begin to imagine,” he said.
The simple question we must ask ourselves is what problem are we solving? Eskom has simply been run poorly. The dearth of leadership predates Andre de Ruyter, even though he takes the medal for plunging us deeper into the abyss of darkness. We simply needed technical and political leadership that studied the country’s growing demand against available and future capacity and then commissioned more power plants. It’s not rocket science.
Our country is on its knees, crying for a return to the simple basics of competence
A year ago, for example, the president announced that independent power producers would be allowed to provide up to 100MW of power. You would imagine that when government arrives at a decision like that, it has already thought of what the process of getting the anticipated power is. A year later, it is discovering that the IPPs will be bogged down in red tape for years before being able to provide much-needed power. Just why did we not think about this and clear the moths last year? Should our failure to think like competent people now force us to pretend to be imaginative, coming up with new “solutions” that are going to take us another 10 years to realise? Our country is on its knees, crying for a return to the simple basics of competence.
The truth is that De Ruyter, like Ramaphosa, is just plainly incompetent. Eskom has degenerated with its eyes wide open. Ramaphosa says we must begin to imagine a China-type future with many Eskoms. But what some of us can imagine is a multiplied Eskom mess. Multiplied debt. Multiplied De Ruyters. Multiplied stage 6 outages.
Take a look at Denel too. Billions down the drain, workers left unpaid for months. Their union must apply to the courts to attach the company’s bank accounts to access funds to pay workers. Two people, Phakamile Hlubi-Majola of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA told us, committed suicide because their lives were turned upside down by sheer incompetence. Are we going to need to create two Denels?
Finance minister Enoch Godongwana told us this week that 150 of the nation’s 257 municipalities are broke. In other words, they’re not in any position to provide citizens with the services they were created to provide. Yet, annually, they receive budgets for salaries just to keep them artificially alive. To keep the ordinary people thinking there might be some services eventually from these officials when, in truth, these are just a drain on the fiscus. Now, do we need to imagine what China does with municipalities? Or is what needs to be done here plain? If municipalities are unsustainable because they have no source of revenue, why create them? Why gift us 150 mayors, their executive committees, city managers, their management teams and officials who simply can’t help us sort out potholes, pick up waste or invest in provision of clean water in their locales? Why pretend we have functioning local government?
It’s the same as pretending we have a functioning police service. The buffoonery that is Bheki Cele is happy to hop from one crime scene to another as long as he gets a microphone. We know the monster he becomes when he gets interrupted by a white man who makes him feel like a garden boy. But if you focus on the nuts and bolts of policing, you will realise we are on our own. Crime statistics make the gore plain. Some of us, in taverns, are shot like caged birds. Some are sitting ducks in their homes as criminals run amok, encouraged by the incompetence-fuelled power outages as our electric fences and alarms are off. Some, at Denel, sadly kill themselves.
At this point, I don’t want to imagine two Eskoms, two Denels, two Bheki Celes. I just want competent people to use my taxes to provide services that government institutions like municipalities are established to provide. How is this complex?
At Eskom, what we need is a leader implementing a programme against which we can hold them accountable. We don’t need two or more Eskoms. This entity, at some point in the past, was led well. It is in ruins right now. To be clear: to demand competence from the Ramaphosa administration is not to yearn for the Jacob Zuma years.
Those responsible for state capture must be prosecuted as expeditiously as possible assuming, of course, that we have the right (read competent) prosecutors and we do not need two National Prosecuting Authorities. Innovation is something to embrace. It has changed consumption patterns and given us new industries and economies. But at its heart is competence. When Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked what lay at the heart of the company’s continued growth and success, he pinned it down to “operational excellence”. Let’s get the basics right before unleashing a million other Eskoms on us. Please.
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