It’s bad that we’re living without electricity in our homes, businesses, schools and hospitals but it's even worse that we don’t know when our self-inflicted power nightmare will end.
And it’s worse still that we’ve had several ministers giving conflicting timelines about the end of load-shedding.
This week it seems the ANC, under whose watch Eskom has been brought to its knees, decided to reject electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s “promise” to end load-shedding by the end of the year.
Going further, the party has decided no ANC ministers should give undertakings to end load-shedding that they are unable to back up with action.
The ANC’s new line, with a seminal election looming next year, is to be “brutally honest” about the state of load-shedding, and to concentrate instead on highlighting sabotage at the utility’s installations as the cause of our power dilemma.
But instead of the criminal syndicates highlighted without much evidence by former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter, we are now told that, yes, sabotage is an issue but that it is being conducted by “apartheid apologists”.
This political interpretation may serve the ANC’s electoral needs but hardly seems the real reason for the sabotage.
Granted there may be a political element involved (apartheid apologists or disgruntled RET elements?) but in the main criminal syndicates are undoubtedly to blame.
The promise to cut down on worthless promises is welcome, as is the commitment to greater transparency. But the party’s attempts to depoliticise the problem will hardly be welcomed by the opposition parties, which are likely to keep load-shedding at centre stage in the run-up to the elections.
This week we are being promised Eskom’s winter power arrangements, and we’ll know just how many stages of load-shedding we are going to get. While the ANC may attempt to downplay our crisis with its “brutal honesty”, expect the opposition to have a field day.
The danger of cutting down on “promises” is a tendency to accept this state of affairs as the “new normal”. Let’s instead have promises that are meant and kept.
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