Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) writes that union has been fighting the ANC’s nefarious agenda to destroy and privatise Eskom and other state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
This week, members of the National Union of Mineworkers and Numsa staged a lunchtime picket at Eskom’s headquarters in Johannesburg to protest against looming retrenchments at the SOE and to reject the independent power producers (IPP) programme.
Last month, Eskom retrenched senior management staff. It embarked on this process without consulting unions and it is likely that job shedding will continue.
Together with government, which is a shareholder at Eskom, the executive management team at the electricity public utility has failed to turn it around. Instead, they have looted it and brought it to the brink of collapse. They have now identified privatisation as a way of covering up for their ineptitude and corruption.
The recent ANC lekgotla recommended that Eskom be restructured and broken into generation, transmission and distribution units.
In the name of “efficiency”, thousands of workers will be retrenched so that the politically connected capitalist elite of the ANC can continue to enrich themselves. One need only examine the renewable energy project endorsed by government – the IPP programme – for evidence of the state’s blatant disregard for the working class and the poor.
Eskom’s own studies showed that continuing with the project would lead to the closure of five power stations and the loss of 100 000 jobs.
The IPP agreements were signed without a social plan in place for Mpumalanga, whose economy is almost entirely dependent on the existence of coal-fired power stations.
This will deepen the crisis of unemployment and poverty in a country where the expanded unemployment rate is 37%, and where more than half the population lives in abject poverty.
We are convinced that the load shedding that happened late last year was a ruse created to deepen the crisis to justify privatisation. At 23% reserve margin, which is higher than the 19% required by the National Energy Regulator of SA, there should have been no need for load shedding.
The leadership of Eskom has absolutely no idea how to run the power utility and its power stations, and its ineptitude is the reason we are subjected to systematic blackouts, euphemistically called “load shedding”.
Businesses have shut down because of blackouts and it has cost the country billions in revenue and in jobs that we will never recover.
In 2008, Eskom was mired in scandal when it emerged that some of its executives personally benefited from blackouts through the increased cost of coal. The leadership of Eskom has a history of abusing this process for its own selfish benefit.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
The IPP project must be scrapped immediately, in favour of a “just transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This transition must be driven by the working class, which must benefit directly from any renewable energy project. The transition must be state-owned and state-controlled.
History has shown us that privatisation is not beneficial because it always leads to massive job cuts and, because profit is the motive, it translates to higher costs for the consumer. More than two decades after the end of apartheid and the majority of people continue to be denied access to electricity because it is too costly.
We know that the future of the economy lies in the growth of the manufacturing sector and in pursuing a job-led industrial strategy.
The working class majority can never escape the shackles of inequality and poverty if we continue on this disastrous path. We cannot keep surrendering our power to the capitalist elite and hoping for a different outcome. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP) will put the working class first and will pursue an agenda in its interests. More than two decades of ANC capitalist rule have shown us that deviating from the working class has disastrous consequences.
The original of this article by Irvin Jim appeared on page 2 of City Press Business of 27 January 2019
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