On May 16, Asghar Adelzadeh and I had the privilege of visiting Mangaung in the Free State. Adelzadeh is a director and chief economic modeller at Applied Development Research Solutions and is also my co-director at Economic Modelling Academy.
And the next day we drove back early so that I could proceed to Bela-Bela in Limpopo.
As a party in the design of the Indlulamithi Scenarios for South Africa, our trip to and back from Mangaung was colourfully decorated by the Indlulamithi Scenario discussions.
The reflection of the predominant scenario, the Gwara-Gwara scenario, was ever present and obvious as we drove along the road. In the four-hour journey you would not miss a woman with a load of firewood or a sack of cow-dung on her head. This by the way remains a stern reminder of the devastating consequences of a government-led manufacturing of the energy crisis that reigns in our land.
The utilisation of biomass as a source of energy violates several of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ironically the hurried bourgeoisie-led Just Energy Transition, which seeks to be surreptitiously achieved by shutting down South Africa’s coal-fired power stations in exchange for an elusive promise of dollars from the West, has backfired at a massive cost to the poor. And the poor end up paying with life and limb because of bourgeois greed.
The best known target in international aid proposes to raise official development assistance (ODA) to 0.7% of donors' national income.
Alas, with the event of the Ukraine-Russia war two hypocrisies were revealed.
The first was the hypocrisy of the West, which had taught and lectured docile and obedient South Africa on clean energy. But instead the West ran for dirty coal to keep their citizens warm, while they also drastically reduced the price of energy to affordable levels for their citizens.
The second hypocrisy was revealed of how callous this ill-informed and unprincipled government’ position has been to its own citizens. It has neither delivered justice nor clean energy, especially to the poor.
This strategy has backfired dramatically, and our hapless government has hibernated in a delusion of grandeur waving an imaginary magic wand to pull solar-powered panels out of the hat, which will leave, and has left, the poor cold, hungry and destitute.
It has exposed people to the raw necessity of reverting to the use of the dirtiest of energy, which massive electrification of South Africa in the first 15 years of democracy had successfully liberated them from its use.
And this after the poor amid Covid were systematically excluded from education because of a lack of access to technology and data. In a continuous three-year period to date, the government has deliberately excluded the poor from education because they have been deprived of energy for lighting for study, reading and writing. And of equal importance, if not the most important, access to cooking.
How backward are our thought processes in our unprovoked desire to please the West on an elusive Just Energy Transition funding. At no point in history has the West kept its development funding promise, and how South Africa fell for this trap boggles the mind.
Over the longest period ever in the North-South slavery, colonial and current neo-colonial arrangement and latterly commitment for funding under decadal development arrangements has the North ever met its obligations. This includes, but is not limited to, percentage agreements of the Gross National Product that would be dedicated for funding development in the South.
The West never kept that promise. They instead ventured all manner of excuses. To date they have not explained themselves to South Africa on the U-turn they took on renewables, neither has South Africa asked. Instead, the latest we know is South Africa went to explain itself to them on how it is contemplating how it will slow the speed of closing coal-fired power stations. The West explained itself to no one. It is simply preposterous for South Africa to go and explain itself to those who have led it into darkness through intrigue.
As we drove to Joburg, we came to a typical Gwara-Gwara scenario of service protests. This scenario says that in a fully-fledged Gwara-Gwara, service delivery protests will read like weather or road traffic announcements.
True to form, we came to one such service delivery protest on the N1 in Ventersburg where the road was blocked by angry citizens. We had to drive back and then head towards Virginia. Here we saw a fully-fledged rail infrastructure with electric poles and lines still standing over miles and miles of land. The enemy here was not our habitual Joburg rail infrastructure looters but fully grown trees that ran the length of this disused infrastructure. This mention was not meant to attract massive migration to the virgin rail of Virginia from the metal-thirsty looters.
Soon we were in Sandton, where the full Gwara-Gwara scenario of a road traffic-like announcement without announcement welcomed us. All the traffic lights were not working and guidance of alternatives was impossible.
True to what Indlulamithi scenarios projected in its three paths, South Africa chose the worst case. It is a truly Gwara-Gwara nation torn between immobility and restless energy. It embodies a demoralised land of disorder and decay. The recovery policy framework has simply augmented the post-1996 policy status quo with contractionary measures, such as a more austere fiscal policy.
The outlook has moved towards an immiserising growth path of the Gwara-Gwara scenario and tethers the country towards a failed state. As a member of the authorship of the Indlulamithi Scenarios, living them on this excursion was like experiencing an Angela Lansbury production of “Murder, She Wrote”.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumnus of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
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