Will the lights go out on South Africa's World Cup?
A race row at the top of the national power company has left it without a leader
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An ugly race row has left South Africa's national power company leaderless and is threatening to turn the lights out in the country only nine months before it is due to host the World Cup.
Bobby Godsell, the chairman of Eskom, which generates 95 per cent of electricity in sub-Saharan Africa's biggest economy, resigned this week after being accused of trying to force out his black chief executive.
The power struggle comes as experts warn that South Africa faces another season of blackouts that have prompted national emergencies in the past two years. It also highlights the crisis of leadership in Jacob Zuma's new government, which is being accused of appeasing "racial populists" as it seeks to contain strongly divergent voices within the ruling ANC party.
The saga at Eskom began last week when the two rivals – Mr Godsell and the CEO Jacob Maroga – laid out competing visions for the troubled state-owned power generator. Analysts said the chairman's plan concentrated on a business-like agenda of opening new power stations and restoring industry confidence, while the chief executive's programme concentrated on re-engineering the ethnic balance of the company's workforce. The board is believed to have sided with Mr Godsell, prompting the resignation of the chief executive, announced late last week.
What had, up to that point, been a business story suddenly exploded into a race row as the outspoken ANC youth-wing leader Julius Malema accused Eskom of pushing out Mr Maroga because he was black. The Black Management Forum, a national lobbying group, then issued an incendiary statement saying state-owned corporations were becoming a "slaughterhouse" for black professionals.
After the race furore Mr Maroga quickly moved to rescind his resignation, and then, over the weekend, both men were reported to have met with President Zuma. On Monday, in a move that rocked markets, the respected Mr Godsell tendered his resignation, leaving Eskom without a chairman.
"This is a complete disaster," said Professor Adam Habib, a political commentator based at the University of Johannesburg. "We have a major leadership tussle in the middle of an energy crisis. It's really irresponsible."
That energy crisis has already prompted concern within world football's governing body, Fifa, which has demanded the provision of an army of back-up generators to avoid the possibility of the lights going off during its global showpiece tournament.
Organisers of the 2010 event faced another setback yesterday as an important transport project was delayed and is now not expected to be ready in time for the June kick-off. The ambitious "Gautrain project" – linking Johannesburg and its airport with the capital, Pretoria – will not be finished until halfway through the tournament after the government refused to bow to contractors' demands for an extra £107m to meet the deadline.
South Africa is already in talks with industry leaders over a "go-slow" during the World Cup in order to ensure that the power needs of the event can be met. Marc Goldstein, an analyst with research group Frost and Sullivan, said that investor confidence would be shaken by Mr Godsell's departure. "This is not a situation that anyone would have wanted," he said.
Yesterday, the ANC's secretary general Gwede Mantashe rubbished claims that Mr Godsell is a racist, describing him as popular within the unions and the ANC. "Everybody must be careful. If there's a crisis, they begin to be personal and go to the lowest level of irrationality," he said.
The race card has quickly led to another debate on South Africa's troubled Black Economic Empowerment initiative – conceived to address the wrongs of the apartheid era but accused of being a wellspring of cronyism. "Black economic empowerment is essential," said the former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein. " But the way it has been done is an unmitigated disaster."
In recent months the government has lurched from one crisis to another in its state-owned enterprises, or "parastatals", with rows over political interference and mismanagement in the transport giant Transnet and the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
"The parastatals' woe reflects the broader picture of what's happening in government," said Mr Feinstein. "Zuma's desire to keep everybody happy means he is not leading."
So far the government has refused to comment on its alleged role in the leadership battle at Eskom but, if the board did accept the CEO's resignation, then only high-level political intervention can have overturned that decision, Professor Habib explained. "For God's sake, how does one government have crises in three parastatals at the same time?"
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Comments
This is a country still obsessed with race on both sides of the ethnic divide. Business ethics as understood (and practised with the occasional lapses) in Europe and North America are nonexistent here, accentuated by the provisions of affirmative action legislation and the constitution which permits public servants to use their official positions for private gain. White businessmen and black civil servants make ideal bedfellows in the gravy train produced by black economic empowerment legislation that enriches the few politically connected blacks at the expense of the vast majority of their impoverished and unemployed fellow citizens.
Julius Malema is not outspoken, he is an uneducated foul mouthed bigot who plays the race card at every opportunity. Similarly, the black management forum does little to develop black talent , it’s main purpose seems to be to put up a defence of racism every time an incompetent executive who happens to be black is fired. Most successful black entrepreneurs and professionals are not members of this body.
However in the Eskom crisis there are a few shards of light, Bobby Godsell has received a lot of support from the black trade unions with whom he has previously dealt in his days at Anglo-American.
But there again, if you're using sports events for political agendas there's eventually going to be a massive cock-up.
"Johannesburg is rapidly emerging as the rape capital of the world" ... "The murder rate nevertheless remains at 52 per 100,000 - eight times as high as in the United States." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/25844
"According to a survey for the period 1998–2000 compiled by the United Nations, South Africa was ranked first for rapes per capita. It is estimated that a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_S
"In one of the biggest but least talked about challenges to President Jacob Zuma’s new government, schools have descended into a spiral of crime that has seen murder and rape in playgrounds and classrooms." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w
"Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights organisation, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ma
South Africans received a horrifying measure of just how bad their country's rape crisis is with the release this week of a study in which more than a quarter of men admitted to having raped, and 46% of those said that they had raped more than once.
http://www.time.com/time/world/arti
"South Africa has one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world." http://www.hrw.org/en/special-focus/sto
I try not to enter into keyboard warrior slanging matches with silly people who who call others "stupid", so I'll just leave you to read and ponder those reports. As for my opinion on the London Olympics, I was against it from the start, and when the bill rose to several times the original estimate, my fears were fully justified. £9 billion (or whatever the latest figure happens to be) for a three-week sports event is just plain (in your words) stupid. Even in the British economy of the time it could have been spent in a more wise way. It was a hostage to fortune, and received the not entirely unseeable smack on the nose when the banking crisis hit the world in general and the UK in particular.
Here's today's news by the way. Sounds just perfect.....
http://in.reuters.com/article/sportsNew
The white chairman accused of racism and the black CEO reinstalled.
The irony is this. The black CEO is very interested in "racially balancing" the management structure of ESKOM. This means standing up for the interests of high level black managers, many of them already very wealthy.
The white chairman is most interested in service delivery. The vast majority of people who do not have an electricity supply in South Africa are black. Very poor black people. The person working hardest for the plight of the poorest is accused of racism.
This is why Africa falls apart.
Everyone knows that this country has been falling apart socially and economically ever since the end of white rule. Crime is completely out of control, the corrupt black government leaders have only ever been intyerested in enriching themselves and being obsessed with crazy racial politics, and their utter incompetence is bringing on a spiral of chaos that will see a huge amount of white flight and the descent of the nation into just another black third-world basket case.
What a great place to host a world cup. You'd have to pay me an extremely large amount of money to attend. I pity the poor mugs who go there, and who will get mugged in their thousands.
To battle the race card we need to blame everything on racism so that the truth can out. From the holes in Joost's underpants (there is a third force conspiracy when Terrorblanche had his pants down his jocks had the same holse) to the winning ways of Baffunnier baffunnier. Imagine finding that racist element in every event, traffic lights, lane changes, green grass and brown bread.