It is utterly infuriating to watch the ANC cynically testing the notion in the media that South Africa needs to declare a national state of disaster to address the electricity crisis.
Imagine pretending that the public utility’s energy delivery failure over four successive administrations is a spontaneous and unavoidable emergency, and effectively declaring a state of disaster against your own government. What exactly are we supposed to believe that suspending regulations will do to add urgently needed megawatts to the national grid?
The truth is that a state of disaster will achieve precisely nothing. That is, aside from enabling the energy minister, Gwede Mantashe to ram through the highly suspicious, dirty, gas-burning, ocean-boiling Karpowership deal; a deal which was rightly scotched by environment minister Barbara Creecy almost two years ago after a failed environmental impact assessment (EIA).
The Karpowership deal is no less shady today than it was in 2021. Allegations that the latest EIA has undergone desktop revisions downplaying the risk of gas fires and explosions and reducing projected noise emission levels are as unsurprising as they are dangerous. And they make it difficult to believe that Mantashe’s categorical insistence — his rank determination — that the 20-year R220bn “emergency” deal absolutely must be approved is anything more than a corrupt money-grabbing manoeuvre.
The government’s endless hemming and hawing over this self-imposed energy crisis is an example of how political leaders will avoid accountability by positioning policy deadlocks as intractable and complex when they really amount to the need to remove the wrong political leaders from positions of power and appoint or elect the right leaders to implement necessary — and often widely accepted — solutions.
It only took a change of leadership and a matter of days for the government to overturn a decade-long policy of denialism based on the junk science notion that HIV does not cause Aids
South Africa’s policy U-turn on the HIV/Aids crisis is a case in point.
It only took a change of leadership and a matter of days for the government to overturn a decade-long policy of denialism based on the junk science notion that HIV does not cause Aids; a policy which became dogma under the leadership of former president Thabo Mbeki and health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
As if under a spell, the ANC under Mbeki feigned helplessness and pretended it could do nothing to overrule this ludicrous position and instead implement a national programme of antiretroviral treatment to save lives and prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
Yet in September 2008, the day the very same ANC’s Kgalema Motlanthe was sworn into office as president and appointed Barbara Hogan as minister of health, South Africa’s hardline denialism was immediately reversed. No complexity, no difficulty, no barriers to implementation. The only binding constraint on implementing a life-saving public health intervention was the individuals that the ANC had chosen to occupy high political office.
A 2009 Harvard University study estimates (conservatively) that the South African government presided over 365,000 preventable deaths between 2000 and 2005 alone because of Mbeki’s anti-science health policy. South Africans died because the ANC put the wrong people in power, and then left them in place to destroy lives and orphan children.
By keeping the wrong individuals in his cabinet, President Cyril Ramaphosa is similarly feigning powerlessness to resolve an energy crisis which has decimated the South African economy and is slowly destroying associated infrastructure. He has the power and the constitutional duty to implement solutions in the best interests of South Africa, and not the ANC.
Section 85(1) of the constitution is clear: “The executive authority of the Republic is vested in the President.” This is because South Africa’s president is both the head of state and the head of government. Any ministerial appointments made by the president amount only to the delegation of this executive authority, which is, of course, so vast that it could not realistically be administered by a single individual.
Cabinet ministers do not, in and of themselves, enjoy any executive authority under the law. They have no autonomy and no independence from either the president or the cabinet as a collective — which is itself a proxy for presidential power. What powers they do have are, in effect, on loan from the president and remain so only until such time as s/he sees fit to take them back or reallocate them.
This is an important principle which should underpin any discussion about the (hopefully) imminent cabinet reshuffle, which Ramaphosa has been signalling for weeks. Under the law, appointing the cabinet is not a function of the governing party, but an act which takes place at the sole discretion of the president. And so long as parliament keeps the president in office, decisions about the size, make-up and delegations given to the national executive are the president’s alone to make.
As the prolonged outages of load-shedding start to impact the viability of connected public infrastructure — interrupting and eroding everything from traffic signals and sewerage systems to the country’s water supply — there can be no excuse for leaving in place failed cabinet ministers who either caused or have exacerbated this crisis. And declaring a national state of disaster is a pretty cynical way to avoid the real leadership work of firing the rogues and appointing competent individuals to the cabinet, who are capable of turning this crisis around.
The only question that remains is who is the Barbara Hogan of the energy ministry? And of the ministry of public enterprises? Who are the individuals who can rise above the internal politics of the governing party and implement the broad consensus solutions that South Africa so desperately needs? And does Ramaphosa have the courage to do what his predecessors did not, and place the national interest above the narrow interests of the ANC?
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