Disempowered

The vote counting may be affected by Eskom’s shenanigans [View this email in your browser]( November 2, 2021 [Mail & Guardian]( Hi there, Poll Position is melting. Having managed to keep relatively calm and carry on for the past week bringing you updates about the elections, it is in this sweltering farming community north of Johannesburg that we have come to perish. Dear reader, those austerity cuts we spoke of earlier today are real. And dangerous. Other media houses can afford to lug around fans and the like. The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has given us a crate in which to work. It is hotter than the devil’s armpit — and smells like it too. This, we can imagine, is a taste of what it would be like to live in a world that failed to get a handle on climate change when it had the opportunity to do so. Our reliance on fossil fuels will, quite literally, be the death of us. The trials of election counting may yet face another challenge. Without preamble, Eskom has just announced it will be implementing load-shedding between 4pm and 5am tomorrow morning. “Regretfully”, it began its announcement, “stage two load-shedding will be implemented from 4pm until 5am tomorrow as power constraints persist.” The IEC had evidently been tipped off about the impending announcement and briefly touched on it during its midday briefing. Discussions were underway, it said, to “insulate” and minimise the effects on vote counting. We can only hope those discussions are fruitful. (The commission also said it has generators hooked up at the results centre so these fans can continue to spin in futility). There you have it. In the middle of a climate crisis, Eskom has continued to feed the beast that is coal-powered plants and yet it can barely generate enough electricity to keep the country going. Our sole power supplier is also skint, with debts so gargantuan that taxpayer bailouts are its only means of survival. Its current debt is sitting at about R401.8-billion and it announced a R20-billion loss in 2020. In an effort to make some money, Eskom has decided consumers must pay for its incompetence with the price of electricity rising exponentially since the Medupi and Kusile power stations were commissioned, going from about 17c a kilowatt-hour to 115c a kilowatt-hour between 2006 and 2021. As South Africa begins negotiating at the crucial COP26 climate summit, how Eskom and petrochemicals giant Sasol transform their dirty, coal-dependent operations, will determine the country’s ability to meet its plans for decarbonisation. The state-owned power utility, which briefly plunged the country into stage four blackouts just before the vote on Monday — reflecting a 4 000-megawatt shortfall in capacity — is seeking billions of dollars abroad to help to fund its plans for the closure of most of its coal-fired power plants by 2050 and in championing renewable energy. Eskom is South Africa’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. As Tunicia Phillips reports, in 2019, South Africa’s delegation arrived at the COP25 climate summit in Madrid in Spain as Eskom escalated the rolling blackouts that have plagued the country for more than a decade to stage six, an unprecedented move that meant that the utility’s capacity was slashed by 40%. And the situation is bleak. That coal we have an abundance of is becoming a risky business and financiers are increasingly dumping the black rock from their portfolios. Pakistan, South Africa’s second-largest coal export market, announced a plan to end all coal imports as it transitions in its latest climate plan submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Eskom is expected to decommission three of its oldest coal-fired power stations by 2026. The latest assessment by Climate Transparency International shows that 74% of the country’s total primary energy supply in 2020 was derived from burning coal — more than double the average of 31% among the G20 group of industrialised and developing nations. Today, the presidency announced the establishment of a partnership with the governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union, to [support a just transition to a low carbon economy]( and a climate resilient society in South Africa. [The debate on decarbonisation is impoverished by its neat binaries]( — you either decarbonise radically, or you are painted as a villain if you do anything else, even if you take one step back and two steps forward in the direction of decarbonisation, Mzukisi Qobo, the head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand, writes. As the numbers continue to tick over at the centre’s giant screen, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the story of these elections will be the dire attendance. Projections at the time of writing have it lagging well behind 2016’s levels and will almost certainly buck the positive trend local government elections turnout has been on since democracy. There are any number of reasons we could count for this. But should it be considered a coincidence that we got this level of turnout in a week in which the planet is engaging in crucial climate talks? Specifically, crux climate talks for which much of South Africa’s political fraternity have had few [redacted] to spare. As Sheree Bega and others [have previously reported in the M&G]( the ANC, DA, EFF and friends have happily relegated environmental issues to the bottom of their respective agendas — if they have a spot at all. Perhaps if parties addressed real issues, they would have real results. Before Poll Position gives up the ghost, study the chart below. It may save your life. Until next we meet, Kiri Rupiah & Luke Feltham [Support the M&G's election coverage]( [Share]( [Share]( [Tweet]( [Tweet]( [Forward]( [Forward]( [Share]( [Share]( Copyright © 2021 Mail & Guardian Media LTD, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive communications from the Mail & Guardian either at our website or by taking out a print subscription. Our mailing address is: Mail & Guardian Media LTD 25 Owl St BraamfonteinJohannesburg, Gauteng 2001 South Africa [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe]( here.