Opinion | Now for the real consequences of the Zuma years

There’s something to be said for sowing seeds before it rains, but nobody ever tells you how to prepare for a drought. The phrase “when it rains, it pours” unfortunately doesn’t come with a drought equivalent; saying “when it dries, it’s arid”, doesn’t quite capture the severity. Decisions made back then and attempts to fix their consequences are going to impact an array of basic things that influence us all.

How much diesel are we burning to avoid loadshedding? That’s just one example that raises so many questions. What will a 20% increase in the diesel price do to the electricity supply and cost?

What will increased diesel prices mean to farming and the cost of food? What will it mean for food security in an already food-insecure environment? Tell me about the impact it will have on industry and the employment of seasonal workers and independent contractors.

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The knock-on effects of this impending price shock are scary to even speculate, let alone realise. And yet, all this stems from increased dependence on foreign fuel when we have a whole Sasol that pioneered commercial synthetic fuel out of low-grade coal. We have piles of low-grade coal, and we even have mines that can get it out of the ground.

But the rail infrastructure collapsed, so we can’t move the stuff, and investment in Sasol technology has never really seemed to be prioritised of late. And energy? We spent so much time fighting over some idea of a Russian nuclear plant proposal that cost more than four Medupis, that we ditched our pebble bed technology, spent five times more than China on a coal station and let the trains we use to move the coal kinda just like, erm, stop.

To be fair, we did put up some 1 500 wind turbines over 34 stations in the 2010s, and clean energy has become about 13% of our mix. But that hasn’t meant that we’ve stopped burning diesel because, for whatever reason, we can’t burn coal. Kenya manages to get more than 15% of its electricity supply from a single wind station. Djibouti, yes it’s tiny, but despite not having any wind turbines in 2022, it now satisfies around half of its energy demand from wind.

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