President Jacob Zuma, right, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa greet the crowd at the ANCs 103rd anniversary celebration at Cape Town Stadium on January 10 2015. Picture: GCIS President Jacob Zuma, right, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa greet the crowd at the ANCs 103rd anniversary celebration at Cape Town Stadium on January 10 2015. Picture: GCIS Related articles ANC geared for ‘second phase of transformation’, says Zuma ANC celebrates 103rd anniversary EDITORIAL: It’s time the ANC reinvented itself In this article Companies and organisations: Eskom People: Jacob Zuma THE trouble with substituting history with garbage is that the genuine historical lessons tend to get forgotten. President Jacob Zuma’s rewrite of history to make the power crisis a legacy of apartheid is wrong for at least two reasons. That doesn’t mean the electricity legacy that goes back to apartheid isn’t important — but it’s not quite the legacy Zuma has in mind. The version of SA’s electricity history he has come up with lately is basically a variant of the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) argument that it is a victim of its own success. It’s along the lines that the millions of households that had no access to electricity under apartheid were lit up by the new ANC government — but the system couldn’t cope with the resulting increase in demand. Hence the load shedding we have 20 years later. The energy problem is not our problem today, Zuma told the weekend’s ANC birthday celebrations. It is a problem of apartheid we are resolving. It is worth noting, for starters, that it was not under the ANC government that the drive to electrify SA’s black townships began, but during apartheid. Eskom embarked on the electrification programme during the 1980s and even by the early 1990s the number of households with access to electricity had tripled (to about 3-million). The programme did accelerate significantly after 1994, with Eskom electrifying up to 1,000 households a day at the peak of the programme in the late 1990s. Happily, though, 11-million households now have access to electricity. But in advancing the blame apartheid argument, Zuma seems in effect to be blaming the millions of poor households that now have enough to power a couple of light bulbs and a stove for using more electricity than the system could supply. The electrification programme did increase residential demand, but this remains a small proportion — probably no more than 25% — of total demand, most of which comes from larger mining, industrial and commercial users. What the programme would have done is increase the peakiness of demand, because the jump in demand in the evenings is almost all from households. That has made it more difficult to manage a fragile power system, but it is not the cause of that fragility. The obvious question, in any event, is why the ANC government didn’t ensure new capacity was built to supply increasing demand. Which is the second reason Zuma’s argument is wrong. In 1998 Nelson Mandela’s government’s adopted privatisation in the electricity supply industry. Everyone agreed SA would need new power stations by 2007 at the latest. The private sector, not Eskom, was going to build them. Which could have worked if the government had at the same time allowed electricity prices to rise to levels at which it would be attractive for the private sector to invest and put the regulatory environment in place to make it happen. The decision to reverse policy in 2004 and give Eskom the go-ahead to build might have salvaged the situation, but much else has gone wrong along the way. That is a longer subject and history cannot be blamed for all of it. However, the electricity surplus of the late apartheid years and the early democratic years did leave legacies that have shaped SA in some fundamental ways. The power crisis of the 1970s led to a build programme that left Eskom with huge overcapacity in the 1980s when sanctions took hold and the economy crashed. By the early 1990s the reserve margin was as high as 40% and the government and Eskom were persuading people to use more electricity. It was not only the era of electrifying the townships — it was also the era of incentives to build energy-intensive aluminium smelters, of discouraging neighbouring countries from building their own generating capacity and offering them cheap Eskom power instead. While Germany was launching the 1,000 Roofs programme in 1991 to encourage people to put solar panels on their roofs, SA was pushing people to rely more on the grid. The pricing of electricity provided a strong incentive to do so — especially through the 1990s, when Eskom undertook to drop the inflation-adjusted price of electricity by more than 30% by 2000. It all made sense at the time. But SA has lived with the consequences ever since. And if policy makers want to avoid repeating the real mistakes of the past, they should study real history, rather than Zuma’s revisionist version. • Joffe is editor at large.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 06:33:11 +0000
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