ANC marshalls its forces to KwaZulu-Natal in final push for votes: The governing party has identified KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng as the battlegrounds for votes ahead of the elections

– The Mail & Guardian

Big business must play a more courageous role in delivering the promises of the Constitution:

We already know that whatever new governments emerge at local, provincial and national levels due to voting after 29 May, they will face overwhelming challenges delivering the promises of the Constitution to all South Africans. 

Big business should be planning now for a renewed, more constructive role in bringing stability to the socio-political landscape and ensuring the country’s future.

On 30 May, South Africans will wake up to a different political landscape. New parties and coalitions, the inclusion of independent candidates in National Assembly and provincial legislature contests, and shifts in support for legacy parties underline the continued vibrancy of our electoral democracy. At the same time, these dynamics of political contestation create a tumultuous environment for the development of social and economic policy and the delivery of public services.

The elections take place at the end of a year in which South Africa experienced four confrontations that were so violent that they registered as “battles” in the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project dataset, together with 658 riots. These were overwhelmingly tied to frustration and despair over the bread-and-butter issues of human dignity and human security defined as fundamental in the Constitution. In addition, 181 incidents of state violence against civilians were recorded. 

Despite our electoral robustness, our social contract is straining to the breaking point.

So, we do know one thing with great certainty. The new governments at local, provincial and national levels — no matter how willing they are — will not be able to, on their own, formulate and implement solutions to our pressing problems such as energy, water, food security, education, housing and criminal violence with anything like the speed or scale required to manage our social tension. As South Africans, and part of its future, business leaders can and must act to reduce social strife.

Commitment to an inclusive economy

Often enough where business has greatly prospered in the new South Africa — for example, in the platinum belt, industrial development zones such as in Richards Bay and in export agriculture — workers and communities continue to suffer the most. 

The platinum belt is increasingly violent and lacking in access to public services; Richards Bay has a youth unemployment rate above the national average and commercial agriculture is riddled with wage, health and safety violations. 

This is not only a failure by businesses and the government to manage the risks and costs of large-scale investments. It is also a failure of the, perhaps naive, notions that emerged in the early 1990s under the aegis of the Consultative Business Movement that one could develop an “apolitical economy” or that, within nascent structures across geographies and multiple levels of government, tax revenue from businesses that caused social problems could be dependably collected and deployed to solve them.

What we have learned in the intervening decades is that it is not enough to have big businesses, even good ones. We need a viable economic model that accounts for the rural poor, the large number of urban South Africans who work in the informal economy and the micro and small enterprises that have largely been left out of the larger economic growth story.

Economies that work for the poor prioritise direct investment in the poor and clear away the barriers to their success. The most excluded and vulnerable are put at the centre of economic planning in which big businesses play a supporting, rather than central, role. 

This is an economic vision to which big businesses can commit and to which they can offer their support.

Ending business corruption and violations of human rights

Big businesses — rightly — complain of the scourge of state capture by corrupt businesses in South Africa. A business is rarely only corrupt with respect to money but is also corrupt with respect to timeliness, quality and environmental and social standards, leaving our infrastructure crumbling and communities suffering from toxic pollution. 

The cost of this falls most heavily on poor South Africans less able to insulate themselves from the negative impacts, even as the playing field becomes ever more uneven for ethical businesses.

Yet, big business seems hesitant to take any consequential action with respect to its own. McKinsey & Co, the global consulting company implicated in the Zondo report on state capture, continues to profit from its business with major corporates in South Africa. 

Bain & Company and Vossloh, just two of many companies implicated in major corruption scandals, remain members in good standing with the UN Global Compact, which holds itself as the leading international platform for business and development.

No large business can long survive without the support of other businesses. Businesses today can largely end the scourge of big business corruption by setting higher standards for conduct in the partnerships they form. 

Given that enforcement mechanisms in South Africa are unacceptably weak, they can advocate for the establishment of alternative avenues for aggrieved people and communities to seek redress for business harms done, sign up to be held accountable by them and only do business with other corporations who do likewise.

Pragmatic action for reduced tension and more positive social outcomes

The courses of action outlined above — only two of many which big businesses, together with civil society and community partners, might incubate and pursue — admittedly have costs and risks for businesses. 

Some will be financial — for example, a mining sector in which all associated workers earn a living wage and in which the environment was protected for future generations, would deliver lower returns to international capital than the current one. 

Some costs will be political, as consequential action for an inclusive economy and a more ethical business ecosystem will irritate some current business and government partners, who might be tempted to take retaliatory action.

So, this is unambiguously a call for business leadership and business leader courage. If we are to transition from the current, entrenched socio-political crisis to the South Africa of inclusive and peaceful development envisaged by the Constitution, then big business must engage more to respect, protect and advance the social compact. And it must do so even at some risk and cost to itself.

As a small, but then growing, number of businesses understood from the late 1980s through the democratic transition we celebrate this coming election day, at stake is the very existence of the Constitutional order on which today’s large businesses depend for survival and which all of us need to prosper and thrive.

Professor Brian Ganson is head of the Centre on Conflict & Collaboration at Stellenbosch Business School, a hub for research and reflection on the private sector, conflict and human security.

– The Mail & Guardian

Ramokgopa: No link between elections and no load-shedding:

The country has now had 40 days without load-shedding as a result of “an orchestrated effort and engineering feat by the team at Eskom” and not because the government is looking to the elections later this month, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Monday.

Ramokgopa told a media briefing that the ability to avoid load-shedding was also because of maintenance last year as well as lower peak-time demands.

“What we know is that the unplanned capacity loss factor is tracking at about 29% as of April 2024, as opposed to 34% of April 2023. So we have recovered, in percentage terms, five percentage points over this year’s April compared to last year’s April,” he said.

The unplanned capability loss factor refers to unplanned loss of energy as a result of generating units not functioning well or at all.

“You do not earn and recover that five percentage points suddenly because the date of the elections has been announced,” Ramokgopa said, adding that credit was due to the staff at Eskom.

“When the team were making these efforts, when we ramped up planned maintenance in December and January, little did we know that there would be a big date with ballots,” he said.

“This is a result of process mapping, in engineering terms, the stabilisation of management ensuring that we use and deploy this fiscal injection received from the national treasury, identifying candidate stations that can give us the best returns in a short space of time.”

“There is no correlation between this performance and the date of the 29th of May,” he reiterated. 

Some sceptics have suggested that Eskom has been able to keep the lights on by burning more diesel because the governing ANC is worried that implementing load-shedding in the run up to the elections would hurt its chances with voters.

But Ramokgopa debunked these allegations, saying the utility has only relied on maintenance. He added that Eskom expects to use less diesel in this financial year and not repeat last year’s situation where it spent R21 billion — R15 billion more than the R6.1 billion the utility was approved to spend.

Ramokgopa said the Eskom board was on track to end load-shedding after achieving its 65% energy availability factor target — a measure of plant performance — for 2024. The  board was in 2022 mandated to achieve an energy availability factor target of 65% for March 2024 and 70% for April 2025.

Eskom was seeing a positive trend towards its goal of ending load-shedding, Ramokgopa said on Monday. “I will not make a false claim that we are there, but we are getting there even much quicker than we had anticipated.”

He said the return to service of Medupi unit four with 800 megawatts, Koeberg unit two (980MW) and the synchronisation of Kusile Unit six (800MW), which would add 2 580MW of power to the grid in the next six months, would continue to improve Eskom’s prospects, especially in the winter months. 

In a statement on Sunday, Eskom said over the past few weeks “there has been a consistent and significant improvement in curbing unplanned outages — due to the success of the generation operational recovery plan which commenced in March 2023”.

On Monday Ramokgopa said unplanned outages were on a downward trajectory, saying: “From 26 April 2024 to date, unplanned outages have reduced by close to 4 400MW from 15 523MW to 11 036MW.”

– The Mail & Guardian

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