In Mpumalanga, the heartland of energy generation, there is uncertainty over what a green future may hold.
Barely 24 hours after President Cyril Ramaphosa gave his State of the Nation address last week saying “we are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach”, South Africans were in the dark again.
Scheduled power cuts, 15 years after the system first started failing, are now a near-daily occurrence. The stage six outages, almost 12 hours a day, which hit after the president’s speech, are as bad as it gets.
Mpumalanga’s coal fields
Blackouts are one of the most important election issues countrywide as they affect jobs, education and grants. They cut to the core of existence for those who live on the Mpumalanga Highveld where 72% of South Africa’s power is generated mostly by coal-fired power stations.
In voting terms, the numbers are small. Two million people in the province are registered to vote out of a national total of more than 27 million, and about half of Mpumalanga’s voters live around the coal fields.
But they’re a very important constituency as coal accounts for a significant chunk of South Africa’s economy, and the failures in the province are felt nationwide. Former CEO of power utility Eskom, André de Ruyter, claimed sabotage of electricity infrastructure added to the power cuts caused by badly maintained systems.
Most of this sabotage — including a bomb threat by an opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party counsellor to another Eskom executive — happened around the coal-fired power stations.
It therefore came as no surprise that Fikile Mbalula, secretary general of the African National Congress (ANC), tweeted last week that the recent stage six cuts were due to sabotage.
He didn’t provide proof but over the weekend the electricity minister, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, ascribed the latest outages to boiler leaks, while still conceding that some “elements” are interfering with progress, a euphemism for saboteurs.
He was, incidentally, supposed to have ended load shedding by the time his contract was scheduled to conclude at the end of last year, but neither has happened.
Politics and power provision are inextricably linked in Mpumalanga, but Ramaphosa’s push for a just energy transition in recent years, funded primarily by Western partners, has given rise to uncertainty and suspicion in the coal fields.
Everyone is just looking for an opportunity to enrich themselves
Hophney Kgakana Moramaga, a small-scale coal miner who is based in the heart of the coal fields in Middelburg, says it’s difficult to grow under the current dispensation because of the political connections and protection needed to scale up. But he still doesn’t trust those who advocate a green transition to renewables.
According to Moramaga, power cuts are being orchestrated to push South Africa to abandon coal-fired power plants and to sell off the coal fields when they become obsolete.
Later, he opines, coal will be revived and those who bought the fields will make a fortune. Thus far, he says it is only Jacob Zuma who “opened [up] a lot of business opportunities and created a lot of millionaires” instead of a select few.
But even though Zuma is campaigning for a newly-formed party that splintered off the ANC, Moramaga says he doesn’t trust any of the current political parties, across the board.
“Everyone is just looking for an opportunity to enrich themselves,” he says. “We should rather have a president who doesn’t have a political party, who is independent and who will try to look at the interest of the country.”
ANC tug-of-war
Opposition MPs present at Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address last week laughed and heckled when he said: “We set out a clear plan to end load shedding.” There’s been mixed messaging from party and government leaders on this matter, at best.
Ramaphosa, a former businessman, is generally considered to be on the side of large, established businesses, and has been leading the push towards the just energy transition in South Africa on the global stage.
But his minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, who is also an influential ANC heavyweight as the party’s chairperson, has advocated for a much slower transition to renewables. At a business forum ahead of the party’s birthday rally in January he labelled coal and uranium as “minerals of the future”.
Ramaphosa, in turn, took time to flatter and woo the voters in Mpumalanga’s coalfields at the party’s birthday rally, which took place in the province’s capital city Mbombela.
“The electricity that lights up Cape Town, in the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State, Gauteng, North West, all comes from Mpumalanga,” he said in an unscripted part of his speech. “It’s something that we are grateful for.”
Ironically, Mbombela’s lights were out for most of the weekend, officially due to a technical fault, and it caused traffic chaos. But in this case, too, some locals and politicians speculated that a cable might have been cut on purpose somewhere.
Politics of coal
More than five million people benefit from the coal economy in the region, Mpumalanga Premier Refilwe Mtsweni-Tsipane tells The Africa Report. “Apart from those involved in [the] formal sector, there are also those in the informal sector.”
Some communities near power stations don’t benefit from electricity as they are not connected to the grid, as the environmental justice NGO groundWork says in its 2022 report. Still, many benefit from the business the industry brings.
There will be poverty without coal, no jobs, and the economy will be drained
The report quotes an unnamed informal trader who sells vegetables, fruit and atchar, a spicy pickled condiment, to coal workers, hawkers, farmers, and police officers in Phola, which is just outside Emalahleni and surrounded by power stations.
“There will be poverty without coal, no jobs, and the economy will be drained,” he told researchers of the study.
The ANC historically had a large majority in the province. Even at its lowest point ever, the party’s share of votes in 2019 was just over 70%. In some highveld municipalities, like Emalahleni, the party has been shedding seats to the opposition, mainly the splinter EFF party.
In 2011, the ANC held 49 out of the 68 local council seats, but by 2021 this had dropped to 35 (just over 51%), with 14 of the seats going to the EFF. The former opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), in turn dropped from 18 to 13 seats, while the more right-wing Freedom Front Plus appeared to usurp some of these by increasing from one to four seats.
While people don’t always vote in the same way in local and national elections, the trends do seem to point to an uphill battle for the ANC in the coal region in the coming polls.
The ANC in the province has largely sided with the coal lobby in its rhetoric. Premier Mtsweni-Tsipane reckons a too-swift transition from coal will impact not only the region but also the national treasury.
The transition to green energy “is a balancing act that needs to be looked at, not negating the fact that pollution has had a very harmful effect on our country as a whole”, she says.
Death by pollution
Pollution on the Mpumalanga Highveld is known to cause more health problems such as asthma as well as more deaths in the region. South Africa has committed, under the Paris Agreement on climate change, to move towards a low-carbon future, but any major slump in the economy will have more immediate political repercussions.
“We need to take everyone along [in the just energy transition] … not only those that are employed by mining companies. There are vendors at the gates of each and every power station of the mining companies, and they sell food there,” Mtsweni-Tsipane says.
She admits that the ANC does not yet have the right formula for providing for those who would lose livelihoods with the move away from coal. “As the ANC we are saying, how do we perfect the system so that it does not leave people vulnerable?” she says. One of the strategies the party is pushing is to prolong the lifespan of the coal-fired power plants while devising alternative job creation schemes.
But the DA leader in the province, Jane Sithole, reckons the ANC has mismanaged efforts to transition from coal to renewables around the Komati and Hendrina power stations. “People have already lost their jobs and [the government and the ANC] don’t have anything for them,” she tells The Africa Report.
“I’ve raised it and the premier said they want to follow through with it, but you don’t know what the plan is on how we will re-skill people to make sure their livelihood isn’t affected,” says Sithole.
She says the ANC-led government operates on a crisis-planning mode instead, and it’s not working any longer for ordinary people. “We stand a very good chance to grow our share of the vote,” she says. “There are so many sad stories of people now unable to put food on their tables.”
But Mtsweni-Tsipane says no party could unseat the ANC. “We will intensify the work that we have been directed to go and do by our communities,” she says. “They still believe in the ANC.” (The Africa Report)
