When society expects turkeys to vote for Christmas and go further to appoint turkeys to be the elections authority, you know that society has lost its bearings, and all that holds its wheels is disintegrating. 

Such is of an organization which believes it has partners in the then enemy camp to execute a National Democratic Revolution (whatever that means) to establish a National Democratic Society (whatever that is). 

Until ANCness understands that it remains the single foremost threat to Whiteness, it will not appreciate its historic mission in context. This is of course if whiteness is still considered to be about the systemic racism emanating from the societal compositions, perceptions and group behaviors of highly funded associations of ‘white people’, and or some influential individuals representing it. In South Africa, its construct as a deliberate state policy of apartheid the social construction of “whiteness” as an ideology tied to social status was institutionalised. Its opposition by a ANC led anti-apartheid alliance resulted in apartheid, its most visible institutionalised representation, being declared a crime against humanity. This has undoubtedly placed the ANC as it most institutionalised enemy. The success of the ANC as an organisation is proxy for its continued demise.


In fact, the ANC should by now know that the source of its strength is not and will never be how it appeases an otherwise disinterested investor constituency, but instead its legitimacy in the eyes of South Africans who are facing the wrath of a zero sustainable growth economy. It should know that without a plan with which it dictates terms to the investor community, South Africa will be a site of bargains by an otherwise unscrupulous global unprocessed mineral wealth hunting investor community. To industrialise, and thus have energy security, might attract mineral processing ideal to levels of a pre-1994 Iscor, ESKOM, DENEL and others. 

Its deployees in government should know that unless there is a general recognition of the state’s, and thus government, moral and legal claim to authority, have its leadership respected, laws and rules obeyed, society will vote them out, even if the alternative is wobbly. The ANC’s legitimacy is anchored on how it creates a better life for South Africans. 

This should therefore translate into the ANC’s understanding that electricity, as an energy form, was at the core of excluding black people from whatever was imaginable as development. In fact the wrath of Apartheid was felt in the energy forms abrogated to black people, BaNtu blacks in particular. There was a time fetching firewood was core to the criteria of an industrious woman. Unless otherwise argued, the ANC might be presiding on a project to disenfranchise Africans in the emerging energy and data security-dependent global development trajectory.

When other societies treat electricity and data as a primary fundamental human right issue at the water and clean air level, South Africa is working hard to build dynasties, oligarchs, and profit centres out of these development enablers.  We are observing the greatest heist of energy as a national resource whose facilitation to propel economic growth must uncompromisingly be a state obligation, being given to a private sector that has to date been loyal to its profits and shareholder value.

The misguided preoccupation with the notion that SOEs are an archaic relic of the past that should make way for private sector involvement should be abandoned as a policy trajectory. For South Africa to catch up with a world that left it behind since the apartheid era, it would require state intervention in industrialisation, propelling sectors of the economy, and energy security should uncompromisingly be at the centre. 

The rolling blackouts are not only impacting the self-esteem of an otherwise low-esteem local government leadership living in a narrative that declares them a terrain of imbecility, whence should be perpetually capacitated, but are eroding ward representation as the basic units of our democratic imagination. 

The swiftness at which black leadership is guillotined from managerial positions at the slightest provocation of the performance expectations and the tortoise character of decisions when its white managers are polarising societal judgement of what is good or bad. The costs of this in the building of a capable state are insurmountable to imagine.

The solo technical battles by professionals in the ilk of Matshela Koko, a sustainability engineer, is waging to save an otherwise subdued and timid black ‘middle of nothing’ class should be embraced as the most critical project by black professionals. There might be a need for this class to dawn its academic regalia, artisan uniforms, and all other symbols of accreditation that it can fix this country if politicians start respecting it, and march to the camp at the UNION BUILDING to ask the President to stop insulting it with ANDRE DE RUYTERism.


Not only is the continued appointment of the Andre de Ruyter cohort in ESKOM an affront to South African professionals in the engineering profession, but a urination on the impeccable legacy of Dr HJ van der Bijl. In the current cohort of leadership at the helm of South Africa energy policy and planning complex, the seems to be no vanderbijlists, yet there are vanderbijls the country can, if political egos are frozen, be assigned to the national mission of giving South Africa energy security. 


It is disheartening to find a subject such as energy security being tossed around as a party position matter rather than a physics and common sense one. It is wrong for the political space to rationalise energy as a factional party policy matter and not rely on scientific definitions and what science dictates is the path out of the morass. The economics of supporting the current path by South Africa’s political leadership, mainly the dominant ones, are nonsensical if our economy is at the centre of whatever they have defined as our national interest post-COVID19. 


While the political rebuilding of the ANC, and the factional chase and race for its presidency, seem to reign supreme in its policy pronouncements these days, its technical capability on matters such as electricity and post-COVID economic recovery are discouragingly lagging behind, if they exist at all. Beyond the conference, energy security will still be determinant to how South Africa enters the technology race propelled by artificial intelligence and many other energy intensive global competitive spaces. What South Africa seeks of the governing elites, as a total liberal order coalition organised in different political formations, is a consensus on how to keep the lights on as a consequence of pure natural science, and how to grow the economy on the basis of the rules of common sense. Once that is delivered they can then go play their power games. CUT!!!