Cape Town - The devastating energy crisis has not only exposed the lies that South Africans have been subjected to, but that the right hand is completely clueless about what the left is doing in this ANC-led administration.
Take for example Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe and his Finance counterpart Enoch Godongwana’s mixed messaging about how long it will take to make the power cuts a thing of the past.
Mantashe said it could take six to 12 months. But it would take 12 to 18 months, said Godongwana during a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
Eskom has now confirmed that South Africans can expect to be in the dark for the next two years. However, they, too, are not sure exactly when there will be a stable power supply.
How could all three be so far apart about an energy problem so severe that many businesses have had to close shop, not to mention the billions of rand that the economy is losing daily due to power cuts?
Consistent and clear messaging is crucial at a time of great crises, and it starts at the top. President Cyril Ramaphosa has been fiddling while Rome burns, leaving a vacuum for contradictory statements to be made by his own ministers.
But he himself would have had us believe that load shedding would be ended in the not-so-distant future. However, his tone has suddenly taken a sharp turn.
In his weekly address on Monday, Ramaphosa confirmed that there are no plans to end load shedding in the short term, and went on to give the same reasons why we find ourselves in the mess that we are in today.
As expected, none of these are as a result of this government, but rather of the previous administrations he was part of.
He pinned his hopes on the Energy Action Plan he announced about six months ago.
“We must be realistic about our challenges and about what it is going to take to fix them. While we all desperately want to, we cannot end load shedding overnight,” he said.
If anything, this says that the president is not a man of his word. He certainly needs no reminder that he was in charge of the war room his predecessor Jacob Zuma established to see to Eskom’s problems, including ending load shedding, nearly a decade ago.
To act like these are new problems is a slap in the face of South Africans and an insult to people’s intelligence.
Cape Times