ANC should learn about electricity from Lenin

The South African economy will be on life support this year with an anaemic 0.3% projected growth, according to this week’s Reserve Bank forecast. More jobs and livelihoods will bleed, the tax base will erode and many businesses will die. Hilary Joffe writing in Business Day on Friday noted “even in the worst of Zuma’s lost years things didn’t get that bad”.

So this week was an excellent moment for our international relations minister to embrace Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who used his appearance in Pretoria to suggest that the global pariah he represents still has friends and influence in the world. Naledi Pandor was happy to propitiate Vladimir Putin’s emissary even if it entailed hypocrisy of an Olympian order.

She is in favour of self-determination for Western Sahara and Palestine but not for Ukraine. She opposes both imperialism and colonial revanchism except where Russia wishes, via invasion, to inflict both on its neighbour. She is in favour of international law and the UN Charter except when she isn’t.

Gone was her first impulse of February 2022 to demand Russia respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and withdraw its invading forces. Now, in a Soviet-worthy inversion of history and a reversal of cause and effect, she suggests it is “simplistic and infantile” to demand Russia respect international law and end its occupation “given the massive transfer of arms that’s occurred”. In other words, Ukraine’s need for the means to defend itself from a foreign invasion justifies Russia’s continued presence in its territory. Go figure.

But perhaps Lavrov, a Soviet-era diplomat, could impart some real history to his South African comrades, which might help them reverse the economic ruin staring us in the face and the human misery behind the Reserve Bank figures.

He might have reminded Pandor and even President Cyril Ramaphosa — who managed to take time off from not resolving our energy crisis to pose for a photo-op with Lavrov

— of a famous Russian slogan from more than a century back. In 1919, Vladimir Lenin gave birth to the catchphrase: “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.”

The rapid electrification of the Soviet Union in the 1920s was enthusiastically embraced by true believers as the realisation of “constant transformation [including the energy one], as consonant with the idea of permanent revolution and social change”, as the Russian propaganda sheet Russia Beyond gushed recently. In the same year, 1922, as the Soviets were electrifying, the old South African regime set up Eskom.

The ANC’s own transformation project here has had the reverse effect. Our electricity supply in 2023 generated less power — 26,000MW — than in 1993 — around 36,000MW. Pandor’s government seems determined to live up to another of Lenin’s slogans — “the withering of the state”.

Just how withered the state has become was revealed in a

Perhaps Lavrov, a Soviet-era diplomat, could impart some real history to his South African comrades

slew of statistics around another failed state enterprise, Transnet. This week the Richards Bay Coal Terminal revealed that coal exports at the facility dropped to just 50Mt, less than passed through it in 1993 — and that was when the apartheid government was subject to international sanctions.

One of the few advantages of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been the potential for South African coal exporters. There is huge demand in Europe to offset Russia’s weaponisation of energy against Ukraine’s allies. But as The Economist revealed in a recent report, “the total hit to South African firms from lost exports and the extra cost [in view of crippled rail] of going by road will amount to R400bn in 2022, or 6% of GDP”.

Lavrov himself is no slouch at inventing history. In May

2022 he was challenged in an interview to justify his claim that Russia needed to “denazify” Ukraine, considering its president was Jewish. He responded by suggesting that Adolf Hitler, like Volodymyr Zelensky, had “Jewish blood ... we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest anti-Semites were Jewish”. Here at home we have energy minister Gwede Mantashe claiming that outgoing Eskom head André de Ruyter and his team were “agitating for the overthrow of the state”.

A final tie which binds the government to its Russian counterpart is the gift for conspiracy. In early 1941, when Josef Stalin received, from Russian spies in Japan and Europe, credible intelligence that Hitler was on the brink of invading, he dismissed it, leaving his country defenceless when Operation Barbarossa commenced. Max Hastings, the war historian, dubbed him “the deaf man in the Kremlin”. What did not comport to Stalin’s world view could not be countenanced.

Our own energy crisis has similar origins. A rejection of intelligence and an ignoring of science. In 1998, the Energy White Paper stated that unless new generation capacity was procured by 1999, there would be an energy shortage by 2008. As professor Mark Swilling ruefully notes, not only was this ignored but “the first load-shedding was in 2007”.

At the height of the electricity crisis De Ruyter called for installation of 4,000MW to 6,000MW of non-Eskom generated electricity. But as the Financial Times notes, “this fell on deaf ears in the department of mineral resources & energy”. Now the government, so late in the day, attempts to fix a mess entirely of its own creation.

Perhaps as good Leninists the ANC will now apply Lenin’s injunction from 1920: “Henceforth less politics will be the best politics. Bring more engineers and agronomists to the fore, learn from them ... so we can really learn the business of economic development.” Late, far too late perhaps. But hope springs eternal.