Podcasts from the Edge

Peter Bruce despairs of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s late night reshuffle in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge. The new Electricity Minister, Prof Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, was just down the corridor running Ramaphosa’s infrastructure programme. If the Electricity State of Disaster he announced a month ago was so urgent why has he not had his man on the job already? Sadly, Ramokgopa is a thoughtful and rather ponderous academic with little record of success in action. Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said when Ramaphosa first mentioned the new ministry that its occupant would be a “project manager”. He meant it as an insult and now sandwiched between two heavyweights like Mantashe and Pravin Gordhan at public enterprises the new minister is going to have a very hard time making anything happen without their permission.

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Peter Bruce goes solo again in this new edition of Podcasts from the Edge, suggesting that former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s revelations about corruption inside Eskom and the direct involvement of cabinet ministers is probably the real reason President Cyril Ramaphosa is being so slow to name a new government. If he knows, as he probably does, what De Ruyter knows and what most of the media appear to have been given access to, it means he knows the names of the ministers involved. The risk of not including them in a reshuffled Cabinet may be intense. At the same time the risk of not firing them now will almost certainly come back to haunt the president later in the year and seriously damage his and the ANCs position ahead of elections in May 2024. Until the dam breaks and a name is attached to the cartels hollowing out Eskom, the country is on a precipice. Anything, it can sometimes seem, could happen here.

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There is "almost zero chance" Eskom or another intervening authority, can end load shedding in South Africa any time in the next two years, one of South Africa’s leading energy experts, UCT's Prof Anton Eberhard, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. He says President Cyril Ramaphosa has felt himself compelled to appoint a new minister for electricity in the side the Presidency, says Eberhard, "because his energy minister has failed him and his public enterprises minister has failed him. Eberhard says that as Eskom’s capacity to generate power fades there is a growing consensus about the case for natural gas as a fuel for generating power, not merely as a replacement for diesel in peaking plant. This might cheer energy Minister Gwede Mantashe but Eberhard dismisses his role in rescuing the economy. Mantashe’s own plan for sorting out load shedding, he says is “reduced and simplistic” and he is astonished that while TotalEnergies has found significant gas deposits offshore near Mossel Bay, the French conglomerate’s efforts to make contact with Mantashe have yielded no response.

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That used to be theatre-speak for when something went wrong on stage and the crowd began to boo. At South African Tourism there seems to be no need. In this episode of Podcasts from the Edge Peter Bruce digs in to the would wide web (i.e. his phone) to find out a little more about the day to day theatre at SA Tourism, the body tasked with growing the tourist numbers our entire future depends on. What he finds are top leaders in the organisation running side hustles on top of their day jobs. These are the guys who wanted to pay Tottenham Hotspur a billion rand to wear ‘Visit South Africa’ on their jerseys. Because, you know, it’s so cool. As an eternally agonised Spurs supporter himself, Bruce could have told them for free it would be a billion rand down the drain. Yes, people all around the world watch the English Premier League. But his team? Even die-hard fans watch from behind their hands.

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In his first podcast monologue Peter Bruce takes his Podcasts from the Edge into new realms. Basically because a guest didn’t pitch up he wonders pout loud when President Cyril “The Vanisher” Ramaphosa's reshuffle is going to happen or even if it ever will.

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Veteran energy analyst and journalist (and electrical engineer) Chris Yelland tells Peter Bruce in this illuminating edition of Podcasts From the Edge that it is going to take something special for Eskom to meet the exacting deadlines it has set itself to restore Eskom’s vanishing Energy Availability Factor. Fixing the EAF, which has fallen every year since Jacob Zuma became President, regardless of who the CEO has been, sits at the centre of plans proposed by Eskom management and now accepted and endorsed by the failing utility’s new board. But as Yelland reminds us, the EAF in any one year represents the average performance of all 90 or so of its coal fired generators. And the decline first has to be stopped before it can even remotely begin to be reversed. Effectively the board, which has just two months to find a new chief executive and then a chief operating officer a few weeks later, has made an executive decision that whoever replaces Andre de Ruyter (who leaves at the end of March) will have to accept and implement.

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As Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Commission, Dr Crispian Olver is at the very centre of South Africa’s swirling energy policy debate. The commission’s job isn’t just to plan a way forward for the country, but to find the money to do it. In this first 2023 edition of Podcasts from the Edge he tells Peter Bruce that, despite setbacks and the growing power of the fossil fuel obsessed minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, plans raised to wean South Africa off coal and presented to the COP27 climate conference in Egypt last November are still in place. The $8.5bn pledged by the EU, the US and the UK is, he says, “secure” despite the resignation of Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter, who helped raise the money in the first place. Nonetheless, he concedes, we are “in a very real and tangible crisis and we have manifestly failed to make sure that we have the generating capacity” we need. “You can’t sugar-coat the bald facts,” says Olver. De Ruyter, he says, did a lot of good but “clearly didn’t have his hands on the machinery at Eskom”. As for the ANC “decision” recently to pass control of Eskom to the department of minerals and energy, the absence of management skills there would make it a “catastrophic move” if it were to happen. “I think there needs to be a second take,” he suggests. For Olver, two key reforms are irreversible. First the decision to carve a separate transmission company out of Eskom is happening (however slowly). Second, there are no limits anymore on how much power private sector companies can now generate. It may all take a while to gel but it can’t be stopped.

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Even if the ANC falls below 50% of the vote in the next general election in 2024 it’ll be able to form “a relatively easy” coalition with a small and perhaps like-minded party in Parliament. Cyril Ramaphosa will shake off the Phala-Phala game farm cash heist problem that stalks him and the DAs best leaders are running the Western Cape and and City of Cape town and not the party. Listen to UCT law professor and columnist Richard Calland as he leads Peter Bruce through the late 2022 intricacies of South African politics ahead of the ANC elective conference in Johannesburg in three weeks’ time in this final and lively edition of Podcasts from the Edge for the year.

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Robin Renwick, Lord Renkwick, was UK ambassador in South Africa from 1987 to 1991. He was here for the end of PW Botha and the release of Nelson Mandela.

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Elections analyst Michael Atkins walks Peter Bruce through the bewildering maze of a rapidly approaching Constitutional crisis over our electoral system. The government has ignored advice from its own Ministerial Advisory Committee and is sending a Bill to the president to sign allowing independent candidates to stand for elections against established political parties. The Constitutional Court wants it done by December 10. For that to happen Ramaphosa would have perhaps a week to think of a way to remedy a flawed piece of legislation. "They have simply chosen an absurd electoral system that cannot work," says Atkins. By December 10 though, Ramaphosa will either have to sign or send the Bill back for improvement. The IEC, meanwhile, has precious little time to reconfigure its systems. The election is in 2024, In political terms, in IEC terms, that's like, tomorrow. It is going to get messy. ends

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