President Jacob Zuma used the ANC’s January 8 birthday rally to absolve his government from responsibility of the energy crises gripping the country, according to reports from the ANC shindig in Cape Town.
Zuma told over 50 000 of ANC supporters gathered at the Green Point Stadium on Saturday that “the ANC government should not feel guilty for the lack of power in the country”.
“The energy problem is not our problem today. It is a problem of apartheid which we are resolving,” he said.
Zuma reaffirmed comments he made in the past that apartheid was responsible for the rolling blackouts affecting the country.
“The reality is that we are dealing with the legacy of apartheid, which was skewed to deal with the minority and not the majority,” the president said.
Once upon a time, under National Party rule, South Africa had the cheapest power in the world, with excess production exported or sold at risible rates to aluminium smelters. Yet yesterday the country had to contend with a new round of “load shedding” as the state utility Eskom ran out of electricity again. The power utility said it was due to “high electricity demand and the unavailability” of some generating units. Stage one allows for up to 1 000MW of the national load to be shed, stage two for up to 2 000MW and stage three for up to 4 000MW.
Eskom has been fanatical about affirmative action and has laid off scores of white engineers, leaving the company without engineering and financial expertise but with high-salaried affirmative-action freeloaders.
“When commentators comment on energy they forget this (that apartheid was responsible for the lack of energy). They want to put the blame on the democratic government,” said Zuma.
However, Zuma refuses to shoulder any blame for the electricity mess in South Africa.
“The ANC government is accelerating the pace to bring the Medupi and Kusile power stations onto the grid and we are licensing independent power producers,” he said.
“We continue to evaluate options to maximise our energy mix including coal, gas, nuclear, solar and renewables,” he added.
A nuclear plan has also been announced by Zuma.
“The ANC is therefore putting energy as one of our apex priorities,” he said.
‘Monopoly capital’
Zuma’s speech focussed on the Freedom Charter, a Marxist document drawn up by Rusty Bernstein and others in 1955 and has since served as a central party manifesto to both the Communist Party and the ANC. He warned against monopoly capital:
“We must break the stranglehold of monopoly capital on our economic development. It is imperative that the Competitions Commission continues to address monopolistic, collusive and anti-competitive behaviour and become even bolder in their preventative and punitive measures.”
Zuma’s statements on the economy were warmly received by the Communist Party and its main trade union, Cosatu.
Cosatu President Sdumo Dlamini said he was “satisfied that the president raised the debate of racial transformation in the financial sector”.
“But it will remain a speech if there is no implementation,” he added.
Zuma wants banking to become more affordable too.
“Banking has become much more accessible to the majority of South Africans, but the excessive bank charges and fees mean that many people still cannot afford bank services,” he said.
The ANC is also preparing to implement a Zimbabwe-style “land reform” in South Africa, pushing white farmers off the land.
“We commit that the land will be returned to our people and the ANC calls on its government to act with the necessary speed to put the legislation in place, this year, to ensure that this happens.”
Yebo, my friend, you’ve heard the bad news: Eskom is broken because of apartheid. It’s racial. Verwoerd made maths difficult and engineering even more so, hence you can blame it on apartheid. President Zoomer has just had his blindingly brilliant insight and all the libtard media dutifully conveyed this piece of anal-ysis to dem voting masses.
What else can you blame on apartheid? Well, Skoppensboer’s ingrowing toenails come to mind. Also, all the faeces in the Jukskei and the Vaal and all the other rivers may be attributed to apaaaatheid, I’m tellin’ ya, my good man. After all, who taught all these citizens to be so disposed as to not make proper use of the ablutions and the extant sewage facilities? The A factor, what else?
If some non-racial dude propels a chunk of concrete through your car window, as happened to Skoppensboer’s niece the other day, and grabs your handbag or your laptop, you can only blame it on apartheid. After all, said smash-and-grabber would not have been out there smashing and grabbing if it weren’t for apartheid. Like the devil, apartheid is everywhere, luring our upright, ethically pristine citizens into temptation.
Skoppensboer is just waiting for the day when the courts and the police stations and the prisons will give it all up, saying: “Apartheid makes them do it, so let’s set all these innocent victims of that crime against humanity free.” If you think about it, why did the Tukkie rapist, Samuel Msiza do the deed? Skoppensboer can already hear a whole mass choir of libtards, including Jaycup Zoomer, screaming: “Because of apartheid!” He could have stabbed his young, innocent victim once or just klapped her without raping her. But no, because of apartheid – even though he was born into this here beautiful democracy – he had to stab her 22 times and rape her while she was almost bleeding to death.
Why did South Africa’s 10 black serial killers (11 if you include one white drug addict) murder 205 people, if not because of apartheid? The fact that the rest of us do not serially kill or rape or lurk about street corners throwing stones at motorists constitutes no proof that apartheid is not to blame for everything that is going so dismally wrong in our once beautiful but presently soiled republic.
What is the solution to the lingering apartheid problem? As any libtard genius will tell you – all libtards are genii – we are already on our way to solving it by means of: affirmative action, BEE, as well as spending any budget that you can lay your hands on as if there’s no tomorrow. Ditto, when it comes to Eskom. The electricity utility just needs to get rid of any remaining white engineers who got degrees at some apartheid university prior to 1994 and ratchet up the salaries and the spending.
In short, Eskom’s employees need to get their act together over there in Megawatt Park and go shopping! As it is, Sandton City is not too far from Megawatt Park – hardly a ten-minute drive by Bentley – and there are any number of luxury-car dealerships in the vicinity where any soupçon of apartheid in the air might be assuaged by the smell of leather inside a brand-new Porsche, Merc, Bee-Em or Audi. Not to forget the Bentley which is, I am sure, one of the preferred brands for Eskom’s middle to upper management. Last time Skoppensboer looked, the Bentley dealership was also astutely situated within a radius of 10 km from Megawatt Park, in William Nicol Drive. So you need not joke anymore that BMW stands for “black man’s wheels” when, much more likely, Bentley is now the flagship affirmative automobile easily within reach of the average Eishkom exec.
Like the collapsing silo of the Majuba power station, Eskom’s problems will look after themselves while we address what every libtard is clamouring for and that is: “redress for the legacy of apartheid”. As the very existence of Eskom’s ugly power stations dotting the country attests to that legacy, it follows that we would be better off without them. We could all have little windmills or solar panels or cultivate electricity-producing bacteria in our bathtubs which would otherwise have been utilised for cold baths anyway.
Talking of cold baths and showers, Skoppensboer has noted that City Power in Johannesburg is threatening to “remotely turn off” the hot water geysers of its recalcitrant consumers in these times of energy scarcity. Caused by apartheid, needless to say.
So Big Brother has, apart from some luxury automotive toys, acquired the technology to punish us for having a quick morning shower while draining Eishkom’s power grid. Which has many more noble uses, such as supplying free electricity in those wards that invariably vote ANC or maybe some energy-intensive factory belonging to a black-empowerment company listed on the JSE.
Some of Skoppensboer’s more radical libtard friends, hanging around the universities where they have the pick of the choir boys and girls, as the saying goes, assure him that the Revolution has not gone far enough. Much more is on the way, and less is more, to quote some apartheid theorist.
Western civilisation is on the way out and we shall return to the pre-apartheid times when everybody was happy, living in huts made of mud and thatch. So Eskom will be a thing of the ugly past and we’ll be rubbing sticks together to make camp fires where we shall be roasting the last skinny rat caught after days of meandering in the veld as hunter-gatherers. Naturally, this will be post-land reform too and the land will have returned to a more desirable pre-apartheid state too.
The only thing that remains is for the University of Cape Town to award an honorary doctorate in political science to Jaycup Zoomer for seeing the missing link between Eskom and apartheid. Most of the cultural-Marxist professors at that august institution must gleefully agree with him and will no doubt support such a move.
We should not neglect transformation, even in the dark.
South Africa’s energy problems were a product of apartheid and government was not to blame for the current blackouts, President Jacob Zuma said.
“The problem [is] the energy was structured racially to serve a particular race, not the majority,” Zuma told delegates at the Young Communist League’s congress in Cape Town.
He said the ANC had inherited the power utility from the previous regime which had only provided electricity to the white minority.
Twenty years into democracy, 11 million households had access to electricity, double the number in 1994, Zuma said in a speech prepared for delivery.
Government was taking action to address the energy situation.
The development of the Medupi and Kusile power stations was being accelerated in order to bring them on to the grid.
“Projects in the region with the potential to produce power in the short term are being assessed and we continue to evaluate options with the intention to maximise all sources of energy including coal, gas, nuclear, solar and renewable energy options, Zuma said.
THE country is not experiencing a power supply crisis, Eskom said on Monday.
“There is no crisis at Eskom. I think the way Eskom gets reported on creates the perception of a crisis,” CEO Tshediso Matona told reporters in Johannesburg.
Mr Matona said the power utility needed financial stability and additional power to make sure electricity supply was reliable.
He said Eskom sold power cheaply.
“We sell electricity below cost compared to other countries. We have spoken about this before … It is a matter of policy implementation, which we do not do ourselves.”
Eskom did not anticipate implementing its stage-three schedule of rolling blackouts again this month, he said.
“We will probably not go into stage three from this difficult patch, but that will rely on additional power capacity going forward,” Mr Matona said.
Stage one allows for up to 1,000MW of the national load to be shed, stage two for up to 2,000MW and stage three for up to 4,000MW.
Stage-two blackouts went into action on Thursday and stage three on Friday.
Eskom was doing everything possible to manage the outages, Mr Matona said.
“It really pains us to have to load-shed. We know the public is not pleased.”
He said a complete blackout would spell disaster for the country.
“We load-shed out of responsibility … A complete blackout would be catastrophic and can take weeks to recover from.”
Group executive Matshela Koko said he led an investigation into the collapse of the silo at Majuba.
“Majuba is urgent … yes, we had a second crack at Majuba, and we will soon take the public into (our) confidence,” Mr Koko said.
Mr Matona said the blackouts had also affected customers in neighbouring countries.
“There is a perception that we load-shed but continue supplying neighbours with electricity. That is not so, cross-border customers are also affected.”
Mr Matona said electricity supply was expected to be constrained in February and March because of budgetary constraints.
“Our financial director is looking at options in this regard,” he said.
The power supply would depend on the availability of diesel during the period.
Eskom used 140-million litres of diesel to produce power in November.
“We have had situations during this past week where the ordering of diesel was delayed due to budget constraints,” said Mr Matona.
“Sometimes, in terms of logistics, things do not go smoothly between us, PetroSA and other suppliers,” he said.
There will not be power cuts as a result of the Majuba power station crisis anywhere in the country, Eskom said.
“There will be no load shedding today . We managed to restore coal supplies to two of the six units at the Majuba power station. This means that one third of the power station’s normal capacity is back in service,” said spokesman Andrew Etzinger.
“As a result Eskom is not needing to implement load shedding during the day. However, the power system remains under pressure and consumers are urged to use electricity sparingly for the remainder of the week.”
A coal storage silo at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga cracked on Saturday and later collapsed. Etzinger said as a result coal conveyor systems were damaged.
Yesterday, alternative measures were put in place to deliver the coal needed.
“For units one and two, we had to bring in coal through an alternative delivery mechanism involving the trucking of coal,” he said.
“Then the coals were placed on mobile conveyors using front-end loaders, and the current rate 1200 tonnes of coal per hour were being brought in.”
Eskom was working on a similar solution for delivering coal to units five and six. He said units three and four were not affected.
The operation involved excess manpower and cost but Etzinger could not immediately provide figures.
Eskom interim CEO Collin Matjila is on the spot over a R43-million contract to sponsor The New Age’s (TNA) breakfast briefings, the Mail and Guardian reported on Friday.
The new contract commits the cash-strapped power utility to sponsor around one TNA breakfast briefing per month for three years, the newspaper’s AmaBhungane investigative unit reported.
Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown reportedly confirmed that she had been approached with concerns about Matjila’s approval of the contract.
Eskom board chairman Zola Tsotsi said the situation should not be “prejudged”.
“It’s a little premature to comment until I get feedback… to tell me what they [the subcommittee] uncovered.”
The contract apparently overshot Eskom’s sponsorship budget and allegedly did not contain an exit clause, which the parastatal’s lawyers allegedly raised concerns about prior to Matjila’s approval of the contract.
Acting group commercial executive Matshela Koko said the TNA contract was part of Eskom’s “continuing relationship” with the company, which predated Matjila’s tenure as interim CEO.
Spokesman for the Gupta family – the owners of TNA – Gary Naidoo said: “This contract was negotiated not with the then acting chief executive, but with the functional executives at Eskom and Nazeem Howa, TNA chief executive”.
He declined to comment on the Gupta’s relationship with Matjila.
Matjila could not be reached for comment, Sapa said.
The department of energy will be devoting almost R1-billion to cementing South Africa’s nuclear energy expansion ambitions.
In her budget vote speech on Monday, Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said that R850-million had been allocated to the department and its relevant agencies to undertake further research and development into nuclear energy, especially in regard to nuclear safety matters.
“Regulations for the handling of hazardous materials, in terms of international obligations, and the development of nuclear policies and legislation to ensure the peaceful use of nuclear energy will also be pursued,” she said.
How South Africa will finance the expansion of nuclear energy, beyond its single atomic power station Koeberg remains key. The procurement of 9 600MW of nuclear power is expected to cost between R400-billion and R1-trillion.
The state in the meantime has worries of its own, including a large budget deficit and rising government debt levels.
The minister did not reveal the final details of the new Cabinet subcommittee on energy security, which will be integral to plotting the course of nuclear in the country’s energy mix. It will replace the erstwhile Cabinet body responsible for nuclear procurement – the national nuclear energy executive coordinating committee. But she said the “process is being refined and Cabinet will pronounce on this matter shortly”.
Alongside nuclear plans, the department will be turning a renewed eye on the opportunities for gas, including shale gas, in the country’s energy mix.
The lack of infrastructure, including pipelines and storage facilitates had made it difficult for gas to feature as a major energy carrier in South Africa, said Joemat-Pettersson. This was despite the discoveries of extensive reserves in the region, including in neighbouring Mozambique, and off South Africa’s west coast.
The much-anticipated gas utilisation master plan would outline the infrastructure necessary “to open up the gas market for the residential, commercial and industrial sectors”. A draft of the plan was being finalised and would be taken through the Cabinet before being opened for stakeholder consultation, Joemat-Pettersson said.
The plan’s scope includes “investigating the development of a gas- receiving and storage terminal for liquefied natural gas, and to meet the gas to liquids requirements at the Mossel Bay refinery, as well as investigating the conversion of Eskom’s diesel plants,” she said.
This year, the department would also continue to refine the Independent Systems and Market Operators Bill. The Bill, which foundered in the legislature last year, is key to overhauling the electricity sector and improving the access of independent power producers.
On Thursday and Friday, Eskom declared a power emergency, but is nonetheless diverting electricity to Botswana while South Africa struggles with rolling blackouts and loadshedding.
Botswana is facing a supply crisis after two units at its only major power plant, Morupule, were shut down when the boilers malfunctioned, the Sunday Times reported. The plant’s output was thus halved and Eskom forced to keep the country running.
Eskom supplied 90% of the shortfall.
“It is a serious problem but fortunately we have our region partners, such as Eskom, with whom we have a good relationship,” Botswana Power Corporation spokesman Spencer Moreri said at the time.
Morupule was designed to generate 600MW of the total peak need of 680MW, but could only deliver 300MW.
Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger told the Sunday Times Eskom expected Botswana to be self-sufficient, but because of technical glitches it supplied the country with a third of Morupule’s previous capacity.
“But that would be reduced to zero in the event South Africa was subjected to rotational load-shedding,” Etzinger was quoted as saying.
“Without supply from Eskom, Botswana would have had almost no electricity available, with significant harm resulting for that economy and for that of the region.”
Eskom also supplies electricity to neighbouring countries Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho.
Ailing former president Nelson Mandela’s Houghton home was among those hit by a widespread power cut in Johannesburg.
The whirring of a generator could be heard from behind the high walls, while another large generator was belching out smoke in 11th Avenue, which runs parallel to the street where Mandela lives.
It was cordoned off with yellow tape and guarded by a lone City Power employee.
Mandela was discharged from the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria on Sunday to recuperate at home following a lengthy stay after being admitted for treatment of a recurring lung infection on June 8.
His home has been reconfigured to ensure he receives the correct care, and some staff who had been at the hospital are also caring for him at home.
His condition was last described by the presidency as still critical and stable, but at times unstable.
Houghton was one of many suburbs on the West Rand and parts of northern Johannesburg experiencing power outages on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, a few hundred City Power workers downed tools late in the afternoon.
They were unhappy about a new shift system the power distributor wanted to implement to improve service delivery.
On Thursday morning, City Power said it could take two or three days to restore power to all effected areas.
“We are currently experiencing power outages as a result of the strike. We have not been able to timeously attend to calls, resulting in a service backlog in these areas,” it said in a statement.
“We are doing our best to restore power in the affected areas with the assistance of contractors. Nevertheless, we expect that full restoration is likely to take two to three days.”
Residents in areas not effected by the power cuts could help the situation by limiting their electricity usage to help ease pressure on the grid.
City Power managing director Sicelo Xulu would cut his leave short in light of the labour and electricity problems.
News agency Agence France-Presse reported that a court order was issued on Thursday morning to compel strikers to return to work, but they had not yet reported for duty. – Sapa
Another pale male: Argentine model and presenter Mario Guerci
by TAU Bulletin
The state of the nation is no more ludicrously evident than Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane’s recent “warning” that “pale males” would return to government in Gauteng if SA’s opposition Democratic Alliance party wins next year’s provincial election.
“It can’t happen, it will not happen” she declared. “Reversals in transformation are unacceptable, and the Gauteng public must be spared the “white gevaar” (danger).
Where in the world are efficiency, skills, creativity and diligence seen as a danger? Only in South Africa, where so-called liberation credentials, party membership and loyalty trump the need to maintain the first world country and its infrastructure which was handed to the ANC on a plate after the 1994 election.
Ms. Mokonyane’s racial invective and resentment has been received with a muted tolerance. Despite the non-racial assurances in the Founding Provisions of South Africa’s constitution, the governing party’s racial diatribes against, mostly, whites continue apace. Indeed, they seem to have increased. The State President’s YouTube clip where he urges his supporters to “kill the boers” and that his cabinet would “kill with a machine gun” is still running, without any apparent move by YouTube to take it out of circulation. (Yet a YouTube clip made by two white South Africans saying they refuse to apologize for being who they are was taken off within a few days of its appearance on the internet.)
South Africa has two parallel universes – the ANC’s self-delusion and the reality. The fact that the country has dramatically slipped down the world’s various achievement indexes over the past nineteen years has either escaped Ms. Mokonyane’s notice, or she is disingenuous in the extreme. Does the rather corpulent Ms. Mokonyane not realize that 90% of the food she and her countrymen consume is produced by pale males? That virtually everything she takes for granted in this country was created by pale males?
From where did the railways, roads, commercial farms, schools, hospitals, potable water and electricity transmission emanate? The very language she uses in a legislature which is not part of her cultural heritage is a language of the pale male. The news print that distributes her humbug is not of her culture either. But she is selective in her vitriol. When this lady shops, she hurries to the pale males’ luxury shopping centers: she was recently seen at up market Hyde Park “posing proudly with her R10 000 LK Bennet shoes and matching handbag”. (Tony Leon, Business Day 30.7.13). Pale males are excoriated but they are good enough to produce and supply the luxuries which she and her fellow anti-white friends cannot live without.
There is no empirical evidence to show that without the intervention of others in Africa (including pale males), Ms. Mokonyane’s culture would have evolved any further than that of those “lost” tribes one finds in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea. She should be grateful that that particular ship sailed around the Cape of Good Hope many years ago and that it decided to stop for victuals. Non-pale male groups who could have manned that ship may not have been so conciliatory to the locals, then and now.
Who created the Sasols, the Iscors, the Eskoms and the country’s nuclear capacity? Who rid the country of the tste tste fly and malaria? Who developed Africa’s premier agricultural and veterinary service, used by the whole continent? Who produces maize and other grain surpluses year after year on the continent that cannot feed itself?
And, conversely, who is busy destroying what used to be the African continent’s pin-up country?
Certainly not pale males. Ms. Mokonyane and her compatriots should look in the mirror. But if one’s modus vivendi is self delusion, then blame is the name of the game. The world has taken note of the Africa of today. It is not a pretty picture. Zimbabwe went from the continent’s bread basket to a basket case. Few if any of the continent’s governments can feed their people. Corruption, nepotism, inefficiency and venality are the order of the day. South Africa is no exception. Who is to blame for Liberia’s status as an African cesspool, or for Ethiopia’s failed state ranking? Colonialism? Apartheid? Pale males? Neither of these countries was subjected to colonialism or apartheid. They are travesties because the people who live there are who they are.
South Africa today could certainly do with some pale males to put things right. But this is not the ANC’s priority: a deep racial inferiority complex trumps practicality.
The facts
Pale males around the world are denounced by the non-achievers with relentless regularity. Whites in the United States complain about this as well. We quote Fred Reed from the US’s Nationalist Times:
“I am weary of the endless denunciation of ‘white privilege’; the calls to abolish all tests in which whites excel, and the need to make universities and police forces and advanced placement classes ‘look like American demographics’. It might be well to note the utter dependence of the US on white men who have contributed virtually everything that keeps the affirmative action classes from living in mud huts.”
Reed continues with examples of this contribution: “Euclidean geometry, parabolic geometry, hyperbolic geometry and projective geometry. Physical chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Almost every symphony ever written. Pierre August Renoir. The diatonic scale. The mathematics behind the twelfth root of two and all that. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal combustion engine. Turbojets, turbofans, Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit.
“The computer, computational fluid dynamics. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Homer. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings. Acetyl-cholinesterase inhibitors. Silicone. The automobile. Bug spray. Public cryptography.”
“Like it or not white men can do these things, have done them, and continue to do them. The evidence shows that all groups receiving affirmative action have not done them, and cannot do them, which is why they need affirmative action.
“The pattern of white men doing difficult things continues. Consider the founders of companies in information technologies. Not quite all white, but all men. Anyone who watched the landing of Curiosity on Mars will have noticed that Mission Control consisted overwhelmingly of white men. If I were rude, I would say to those who criticize: invent your own things.”
Reed cites South Africa as an example of a tragedy in the making. “A constantly dwindling number of whites are at the mercy of a predatory welfare class and it’s possible they can’t and won’t carry the rest of the population. If things get worse for them, they will simply flee the country.”
Whether this scenario plays itself out in South Africa is up to the whites. But Ms. Mokonyane mustn’t take too much for granted. Her dislike of pale males borders on the obsessive, to the point where common sense and practical considerations for the benefit of all South Africans are cast aside in an all-consuming and embittered realization that her ANC cannot feed its people, cannot govern, and are no better than what the world has seen emanate from the rest of the continent over the past fifty years. She knows this, the ANC knows this, and the world knows it. Keeping out the pale males won’t improve the ANC. This racial animosity is inimical not only to whites but, eventually, to the future of all South Africans.
The pale male acrimony is however selective. Ex president Nelson Mandela was not interned in an ANC-run hospital. The new ANC elite have quietly bought houses in so-called white areas. They send their children to white schools. They want the pale male’s education system. (Every university in South Africa is a white creation). What is the yardstick against which anything of worth in South Africa is judged if not against a pale male-created yardstick? Are the elite’s suits bought from Nigeria or Italy? Is there such a thing as a Ghanian IPod? Do they fly Air Kenya or British Airways? Do they go to Mali for their holidays or to Paris?
A South African business journalist refers to “the African No” – “a jumbled melee of endless meetings, unreturned phone calls and ignored e-mails”. Compare this approach with the white world. The United States for example accounts for 4,5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s GDP. When people flee their terrible countries they try for Europe, Australia and other pale male bastions. They don’t want to emigrate to Zambia or the Sudan.
A cursory trawl through South Africa’s productive sector sees pale males as police divers, as rescue helicopter pilots, as paramedics, as the donors to charities, as the bedrock of the taxpayer base, as the underpinners of the medical profession, the service industry, the banking and the mining sector. The country is divided into the producers and the consumers, and we know on which side of the divide the pale male sits.
Virtually all of the productive farms that were handed over to ANC supporters under the government’s land redistribution policy failed: a pithy example of pale male producers and ANC-created destruction.
It is a pity that more media space is not given to a frank analysis of who are the drivers of the South African economy, instead of to those who talk about nationalization, about transformation, about white racism and so-called privilege. South Africans might get a clearer picture of who is really important in the grand scheme of things, as opposed to those who can talk the leg off an iron pot, hold press conferences, fly all over the world first class, endlessly discuss turnaround strategies and blame everyone but themselves for their shortcomings. Within ten years, South Africa’s social spending (including huge government employee wage bills) will exceed government revenue. Employee compensation as a share of government income went from 31,7% in 2008 to 44,3% in 2012. South Africa’s pale males are a finite group – even they cannot hope to foot the bill for this parasite profligacy forever.
Maybe then South Africa will value its pale males, but it may be too late.
(Extract from Nationalist Times courtesy of Impact magazine)
South Africa is destined to get more nuclear power stations as means of electricity generation as part of the Integrated Resources Plan.
It is envisaged that 9 600 megawatt of electricity will be generated in this manner by 2030 but nuclear power stations are not universally welcomed, especially after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.
These issues will be on the agenda of the Nuclear Industry Association’s (Niasa) annual convention starting in Port Elizabeth on Wednesday but even more significant is that Thyspunt, a 90-minute drive from Port Elizabeth is the preferred site for South Africa’s second nuclear-fuelled electricity plant.
Over the past six years, the proposed nuclear power station for Thyspunt has been opposed on several grounds. These include environmental, cultural and agricultural.
A third draft Environmental Impact Assessment is due to be released by Eskom in October which will then re-ignite the public participation progress.
Those opposing the building of a nuclear power station at Thyspunt are very concerned about the lack of transparency in the process.
“This site was selected by the previous regime by the apartheid Government. It would have been really great if we could start the selection process again in the new South Africa which would have been more inclusive and would look more at the situation that it is at the moment,” says the Thyspunt Alliance’s Trudi Malan.
She says that they are greatly concerned by the fact that it seems that Eskom is not really paying attention to what they are being told about this specific site at Thyspunt.
The Niasa convention will also be looking at the potential economic developments surrounding the implementation of the nuclear programme in South Africa.
The technologies used are foreign based but the potential for job creation is based in the construction phase creating cautious optimism for organised business.
“We have companies that are in the energy space and in the engineering and manufacturing space. We advocate for them to get an opportunity on such a big plant. It is complicated in one sense but it still works with bolts and nuts and pipes and valves. The point is also to demystify such a plant that it is not as complicated sometimes as it gets presented,” says Nelson Mandela Bay business Chamber’s Mandla Madwara.
A second nuclear power station for South Africa is not a done deal yet and indications are that the court will probably have the last say as those opposing nuclear power say they will take it all the way. – SABC
Allegations of massive fraud related to Eskom’s ill-starred Medupi and Kusile power station projects have begun to emerge from the collapse of First Strut, the Mail & Guardian reported.
Central to the claims is steel fabrication company Cosira, which construction group First Strut bought in November 2012 from the Da Silva group in a deal funded with a R385-million bond issue.
Cosira was subcontracted by prime contractor Alstom to supply and construct the turbine halls at Medupi and was a joint venture partner for the turbine hall desulpherisation plant at Kusile.
Medupi has been dogged by delays and concern that key tenders may have favoured the business interests of the ANC – which, through Chancellor House, has an interest in boiler supplier Hitachi.
First Strut, which trades as First Tech, applied to put Cosira into business rescue on June 13 this year.
Six days later, First Strut’s gay chairperson and financial director, Jeff Wiggill, was found shot dead next to his Bentley in Protea Glen, Johannesburg.
His murder precipitated the collapse of First Strut and indications are emerging that Wiggill presided over what is – separate to the Cosira transaction – shaping up to be the largest corporate fraud and loan default in South African history.
First Strut director Andris Bertulis applied to liquidate Cosira. In his affidavit, Bertulis alleged that since taking control of the company First Tech had uncovered significant misrepresentation of its assets.
“As an illustration, a deeper look into one of the applicant’s projects, the Medupi project, revealed that the loss there was not the original R27-million … but rather a current projected loss of roughly R140-million.
“What’s coming out of that is the huge amounts of debt. I mean, they are talking in the region of R3.5-billion.”
The Bertulis affidavit alleges that lawyers engaged by First Strut analysed Cosira’s books during April 2013 and, on that basis, revised the company’s value down from a claimed positive R183-million to a total negative of R323-million.
Da Silva group chief executive John da Silva denied any wrongdoing. He said they had not been given an opportunity to respond to Bertulis’s claims.
“You’ve got to understand one thing: initially, when that affidavit came out … the rest of the [First Strut] group was still intact and Mr Bertulis was going around looking for any financial issue that the group had on Cosira.
Da Silva referred further queries to his lawyer.
Eskom declined to comment, referring all queries to Alstom.
A spokesperson for Alstom declined to answer detailed questions, but issued a statement noting: “Alstom did not purchase raw steel from Cosira, but a supply and construction service, for which Alstom paid a composite fee based on market-related pricing. Cosira has delivered all the steel and materials it was contracted to supply to the Medupi site. In light of recent developments, Alstom as the main contractor … has stepped in wherever possible to ensure timely completion of the deliverables and mitigate any material impact on the projects. Further questions should be directed to Cosira.”
An investigation has raised questions about the pricing of steel for the Eskom contract and the artificial insertion of middlemen between steel fabricators and steel suppliers such as Macsteel and Trident.
The M&G has established that, in March 2009, coinciding with the Eskom contracts, Cosira set up a shelf company called Copper Moon Trading 653, with two directors: Monique Fisher and Molemo Kgomo.
Fisher was until then the personal assistant to one of the senior Cosira executives. Kgomo was married to Cosira director Molefe Kgomo.
The announcement by national utility Eskom that the first unit of its disaster-prone 4,764MW Medupi coal power plant is now unlikely to be commissioned until the latter half of 2014 means South Africa could face 700MW gap in its 2014 electricity supply balance.
The plant’s first unit was initially expected to begin operating in April 2012. Eskom is blaming its contractors; consumers in South Africa and the region will again be concerned that they could lose out if power has to be rationed in Africa’s largest economy.
South Africa traditionally produced a power surplus and exported to its neighbours, but the balance started to swing from surplus into deficit in the mid 2000s and in 2008, the country suffered dramatic blackouts that underlined the under-invested electricity supply industry’s capacity to damage the economy.
The government and industry have few doubts about the extent of the problem. Public enterprises minister Malusi Nkanyezi Gigaba pulled no punches in April when he stressed the government’s commitment to bringing the first 800MW of power from Medupi Unit 6 of online by end-year.
Gigaba told reporters that “failure to meet these deadlines will result in tough penalties being imposed on any party responsible for such delay”.
Barely three months later it seems the minister and Eskom have admitted defeat, while project costs have spiralled – to over $14bn.
The innocuously titled Eskom Update on its New Build Programme delivered another blow to South Africa at a time when fears about declining mining output – an industry in which electricity can account for as much as 32% of total costs – and poor macroeconomic performance are weighing on investors’ minds.
In its update Eskom said the December target for commissioning Unit 6 was “unlikely to be met”. A “more realistic” target was H2 2014. However, full commissioning was still expected in 2017.
This is a View article from the African Energy newsletter, a respected source of independent analysis on the continent’s energy industries produced by Cross-border Information, a business intelligence company with a long established research focus on the politics, energy and financial sector trends of Africa and the Middle East.
Randfontein is in the middle of an electricity crisis. The Randfontein Local Municipality needs to come up with at least R61,2 million in order to keep the light on in the town.
Randfontein Executive Mayor Sylvia Thebenare have issued statements to the contrary regarding this matter.
The Herald has discovered that the municipality’s Infrastructure Department has detailed in a report to the Chief Financial Officer and the Acting Municipal Manager that they need at least R61,2 million worth of urgent intervention to be able to effectively provide electricity to Randfontein residents.
The first point mentioned in the report concerns the intake transformers at substations across Randfontein.
According to the report, the Randfontein Local Municipality only has one spare 10MVA intake transformer on hand, which currently is being repaired after it failed recently, leaving a large section of the agricultural holding areas in Randfontein without power for three days.
The report goes on to warn that if any of the other intake transformers currently in use should fail, all areas serviced by that substation will be without electricity for at least 12 weeks.
The report mentions that at least two of Randfontein’s primary substations and three secondary substations require urgent attention.
The repairs require an estimated R1,2 million.
These are not the only problems though, and the report goes on to discuss the state of the MV switches at substations.
Switches at two of the substations are old and unsafe to operate, requiring replacement at a cost of R500 000 each.
The big shock though, comes when the report goes into the state of the existing overhead as well as the underground electricity networks.
The report details seven areas in Randfontein where the existing overhead networks need urgent attention.
These areas are Wheatlands, Oosterplots, Elandsvlei, Loumarina, Bootha Plots, Pelzvale and Randfontein South, as well as Middelvlei.
In the report, Infrastructure Department Director Nokwazi Ndlala admits that the overhead electrical networks in these areas do not currently comply with regulations as set out by the National Energy Regulator with regard to quality of supply standards.
She warns that failure to refurbish the networks can result in costly legal implications for the municipality and possibly even the revocation of the municipality’s electricity distribution license.
The Department has projected that they need at least R22 million for these urgent repairs.
According to the report the underground electricity networks of Culemborg Park and Toekomsrus are 35 to 40 years old and need to be replaced urgently.
The cost of these project have been calculated to R10 million each.
The mayor’s recent response to an open letter published in the Herald is hard to believe in light of this document.
In her response, she says straight out that the electricity substations in Randfontein are not old and dilapidated, yet a report by her own director of Infrastructure states otherwise. – The Herald
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What else can you blame on apartheid? Well, Skoppensboer’s ingrowing toenails come to mind. Also, all the faeces in the Jukskei and the Vaal and all the other rivers may be attributed to apaaaatheid, I’m tellin’ ya, my good man. After all, who taught all these citizens to be so disposed as to not make proper use of the ablutions and the extant sewage facilities? The A factor, what else?
