Eskom

A Multitude of Crises: Cartoons for November and December 2022

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With the latest fuel hikes, the already beleaguered South African consumer would have to find even more wriggle room in their monthly budgets to fill their tanks. They would also have to accommodate the rise in the cost of goods that would inevitably follow these price increases.

With the presidential race hotting up the probe into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala farm robbery reached a crucial stage. At this stage. the two front-runners appeared to be Ramaphosa and Dr Zweli Mkhize although an adverse finding against the president could affect his chances of being re-elected.

The SAHRC found that comments made by EFF leader Julius Malema constituted incitement to violence and hate speech and requested he retracts them. Having refused to do so, Juju, later in the same week, went on to demand that copies of Jacques Pauw’s Our Poisoned Land be removed from all bookstores because of specific allegations it made against him.

Responding to criticism in parliament over the ongoing Eskom crisis, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said government intervention, including President Cyril Ramaphosa’s energy plan and Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), should be given a chance to take effect.

The country was plunged into crisis as the section 89 panel set up to investigate the Phala Phala scandal found that President Cyril Ramaphosa had an impeachment case to answer over serious violations of the constitution for exposing himself to conflict of interest, doing outside paid work and contravening the Corruption Activities Act.

President Cyril Ramaphosa secured the political support of the majority of his party as the delay in the vote for his impeachment gave him respite for a week. The president slammed the Section 89 panel for relying on the Fraser accusations in their findings.

The ANC’s acting Secretary-General, Paul Mashatile, referred Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to the ANC’s disciplinary committee. This came after she went against party instructions to vote against adopting the Section 89 report on Phala Phala.

With Christmas fast approaching, South Africa continued to suffer relentless load shedding. Eskom was thrown into further disarray with the resignation of its CEO, Andre de Ruyter.

Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected leader of South Africa’s ruling ANC Party despite being badly damaged by a cash-heist scandal that has dogged him for months. His re-election came at a time when the country was being beset on all sides by a multitude of crises – crises that threatened to get worse with every passing moment of indecision or inaction by Ramaphosa and his government.

Coming Back to Haunt Him: Cartoons for May and June 2022

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In the same week that Eskom implemented yet another round of load shedding, the Msunduzi Municipality announced it had assigned a team to investigate what was suspected to be a coordinated campaign to sabotage its electricity and water infrastructure. Ongoing outages caused by a persistent lack of investment in maintenance further added to the problems, continuing to cripple an already battered local economy.

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs (Edca) revealed that while 97 rhinos were poached in 2021, a startling 60 rhinos were killed between January 1 and March 25 this year. Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife blamed budget constraints for the inadequate resources to curb the scourge. Meanwhile, COGTA MEC, Sipho Hlomuka announced additional support measures – including an amount of R25 million – for the embattled Msunduzi Municipality, still struggling to address crippling electricity supply problems and growing pothole challenges.

According to the latest data from the Central Energy Fund, petrol and diesel prices looked set for large increases in the first week of June. Grain prices also sky-rocketed on the back of shortage fears also brought about, in part, by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Nature’s wrath struck again as the second bout of floods damaged homes and infrastructure in parts of KwaZulu-Natal. The weekend’s heavy rains came as many of the April flood victims were still trying to rebuild their lives while others searched for their loved ones who had been washed away.

Businesses and consumers would have to tighten their belts as the recent fuel price hikes were predicted to have a devastating effect on everyone. They would also have an effect on the country’s repo rate as the government struggled to rein in rising inflation.

Questions were raised about whether President Cyril Ramaphosa was involved in criminal behaviour after former SSA director-general Arthur Fraser opened a criminal case against him. Fraser alleged that Presidential Protection Unit head Major-General Wally Rhoode and Ramaphosa were involved in a cover-up of a burglary on the president’s farm in 2020.

The public furore over the burglary of alleged millions from President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Limpopo farm just before the ANC holds it its crucial provincial conference has left his enemies in the ANC – mostly the Jacob Zuma-aligned RET faction – scenting blood. A delegation of secretaries and chairpersons from all eleven of KwaZulu-Natal’s regions immediately descended on Nkandla to confer and receive “wisdom” from the former president.

The four-and-a-half-year State Capture Enquiry finally came to an end when Chief Justice Raymond Zondo released the final part of his voluminous report. Former president Jacob Zuma, who condemned South Africa to state capture, remained the golden thread running throughout the report although Zondo also said that President Cyril Ramaphosa could have done more to lessen its grip.

A Failure to Deliver: Cartoons for September and October 2021

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Pietermaritzburg and Midlands Chamber of Commerce CEO Melanie Veness called on the City to protect its electricity structure or risk losing out on investment. She said some businesses in the Mkondeni area were at times forced to go without power for up to two weeks as a result of, among other things, illegal connections. This was having a devastating impact on confidence and some had already relocated to other parts of the country…

The situation in many South African municipalities remained dire with the Auditor-General warning, in a recent report, that the financial situation of just over a quarter of them was such that there was doubt that they would be able to continue operating as going concerns. Leadership instability, poor oversight by councils, significant financial health problems, protests and strikes, a lack of consequences and interventions that were not effective, were all contributing factors to a general inability to deliver services to citizens.

In KZN, the position had been exacerbated by the recent unrest and looting with more than half of its rural towns facing economic devastation.

The National Teacher’s Union (Natu) slammed the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government for using budget cuts as an excuse to deny pupils quality education. Natu acting president, Sibusiso Malinga, said the union would approach the courts should the KZN education department go ahead with plans to retrench 2 000 teachers.

Appearing before the Pietermaritzburg High Court, Jacob Zuma’s advocate, Dali Mpofu, said the former president continued to be “most concerned” by the alleged leaking of his confidential medical information by state advocate Billy Downer. This was but the latest in a long list of arguments put forward by Zuma in his attempts to get the Arms Deal corruption charges against him dropped. The judgement was postponed until 28th October.

Despite damning Special Investigative Unit (SIU) findings against former health minister Zweli Mkhize, his family and his local ANC branch (and President Cyril Ramaphosa himself) rallied behind him. In a report, which the president had sat on for three months, the SIU claimed that Mkhize failed to exercise oversight in relation to the Digital Vibes communications tender awarded to the company by the Health Department.

Delivering the parties so-called corrective manifesto ahead of the forthcoming local elections, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised that this time the ANC will do better. Considering his party has spent almost three decades in power, during which time they have delivered very little of their promises, his assurances were met with a certain degree of scepticism. Elsewhere, the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma intensified, prompting the evacuation of 6000 people.

Various businesses in the Pietermaritzburg area again warned that the prolonged power outages and load shedding were crippling them. The situation was exacerbated by the exorbitant price of electricity in Msunduzi.

Msunduzi’s attempt to boast about its service delivery achievements was blasted by irate residents who called the city out on its glaring failures. They were responding to a Facebook post where the municipality had a picture of the Moses Mabhida road which they listed as one of their success stories even though it had been funded entirely by the national Department of Transport.

With municipal elections looming in just under a week, Eskom announced it would be implementing Stage Four load shedding because of numerous breakdowns, including a key unit at the Koeberg power station. At a media briefing, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and current Eskom group chief executive Andre de Ruyter both acknowledged the endemic corruption and mismanagement that had plagued the power utility for the last decade. Meanwhile, the latest Citizen Satisfaction Index dropped to a five-year low as South African municipalities continued to fail to meet basic delivery requirements.

Book Reviews

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Published by Tafelberg.

Tom Eaton is undoubtedly one of South Africa’s most witty and erudite commentators with a brand of humour that manages to be both razor-sharp and wryly tongue-in-cheek at the same time.

His latest collection, still fresh despite being mostly written before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, rails against current political shibboleths to entertaining and pointed effect. As is only to be expected, Eaton pulls no punches as he takes satirical swipes at a number of rather large and obvious targets – the ANC, Eskom, the SABC – but with his slightly skewed, off-centre approach he manages to illuminate this familiar territory with sharp flashes of novel insight..

Of course, no book about South Africa’s recent history would be complete without a dissection of the rotting cadaver of state capture that was the hallmark of Jacob Zuma’s time in office and Eaton duly obliges with a typically excellent, if typically depressing, essay on the man and the damage he inflicted on the country

In places, it is not at all a comfortable read. Eaton has a habit of shredding many of our common self-deceptions and irrational beliefs, as well as the sort of deluded wish-thinking that often characterises public debate. He includes, for example, a very thoughtful and balanced piece on the role of politics in sport in South Africa, arguing that it is naïve to think you can separate the two. In a chapter dealing with another vexed, contentious South Africa issue – the re-imposition of the death penalty – he puts forward a similarly persuasive argument, showing how we often allow our heated feelings on the subject to override common sense.

Eaton does not confine himself just to local matters. Elsewhere, he includes a perceptive essay on what is happening in the United States, a nation which seems to have been dumbed down to the extent where responsible and informed policy has largely ceased to exist under a regime that denies the reality of global warming and which has a president who advocates drinking bleach as a cure for Covid-19..

Eaton’s writing can be pithy. It can also be deadpan. Underpinning it all, though, is a deep vein of seriousness which forces you reconsider and look again at many of your own assumptions about the sort of society we live in. Or, as Eaton himself puts it, the book is “about trying to resist the knee-jerk responses that professional manipulators want us to have…”

Intelligent, well written and extremely funny, Is it Me or is Something Getting Hot in Here? is a terrific compendium of the incompetence and occasionally appalling behaviour of those in whom we have entrusted our vote. It also holds up a not always flattering mirror to ourselves…

Published by Bantam Press

With his blend of sardonic humour and noble integrity, Lee Childs’ laconic hero, Jack Reacher, is one of crime fictions most likeable and engaging characters.

In his latest outing we find him sitting on board a Greyhound bus, heading along the interstate highway, with no particular destination in mind. Across the aisle an old man sits asleep with a fat envelope of money hanging out of his pocket.

Reacher is not the only one who has spotted it. When the old man gets off, at the next stop, he is followed by another passenger with slicked-back, greasy, hair and a goatee beard. Naturally Reacher, his suspicions aroused, decides he better disembark as well, just in case the other guy has bad thoughts on his mind….

He has. Needless to say, by the time Reacher has finished with him he has good reason to regret ever harbouring them. While obviously grateful for Reacher’s intervention the old man is clearly reluctant to explain who the cash is intended for or to let him get further involved in his affairs.

This merely serves to pique Reacher’s interest further. Having insisted on accompanying the old man home, he eventually gets him to admit that he and his similarly elderly wife are the victims of an ugly extortion racket.

For a loner like Reacher who only becomes sociable when he meets good people in a jam, this goes against the grain and he immediately decides that the time has come to mete out his own particular brand of retributive justice against those who are making the old folks life a misery.

It takes Reacher little time to flush out the enemy but he also discovers he is vastly outnumbered. Despite finding himself caught up in the middle of a particularly vicious turf war, however, between two nasty rival gangs – the one Albanian, the other Ukrainian – he never seems to be in danger of losing his head.

Author, Lee Child, is a reliable performer and once again delivers an enjoyably familiar, violent, pacey, caper. The action sequences are handled with his customary elan while, at the same time, he convincingly manages to convey the sleazy, menacing, underbelly of modern city life.

“It is filthy, it stinks”: Cartoons for January and February, 2020

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SUMMARY:

As the Australian bush-fires continued to rage across large tracts of the continent – by early January an estimated 5 million hectares had been destroyed (as opposed to 906 000 hectares in the Amazon fires) – its governments initial tepid response and refusal to acknowledge the true extent of the crisis attracted widespread criticism. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s own inability to utter the words “climate change” without breaking in to a cold sweat also showed a woeful reluctance to engage with the issues presented.

In the same week that it was reported that the two big KZ-N municipalities, Msunduzi and uMgungdlovu, were muscling up against each other to become a regional metro, Pietermaritzburg was visited by two ANC heavyweights, Zweli Mkhize and Blade Nzimande. They were both blunt in their assessment. The city is filthy, it stinks and its leadership is useless.

Eskom continued to be in the news for all the wrong reasons with the embattled power utility now saying that if it is not granted the substantial tariff increases it wants from March, its finances might collapse, triggering a national crisis, as both the state’s credit ratings and consumers’ well being would suffer. Responding to this, Melanie Veness, CEO of the Pietermaritzburg and Midlands Chamber of Business, warned that the proposed increases would be the final nail in the coffin for local businesses and would lead to retrenchments and a greater strain on the already struggling business sector.

Under pressure from detractors and enemies both inside and outside government and the ANC, Public Enterprises Minister, Pravin Gordhan, said he was following a mandate given to him by President Cyril Ramaphosa and that he must be left alone to complete the task he was given. With load-shedding costing the country between R59billion and R118billion in 2019, one can only hope he succeeds with his Eskom turnaround strategy.

After several years of acrimonious debate, the United Kingdom officially left the European Union on the 31st January, 2020. The country’s exit will undoubtedly prove to be British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s, biggest victory. At the same time it is very much a leap in to the dark and whatever happens in the coming stages of the Brexit process things look set to get more, not less, tricky.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal shut its doors after a week of violent protests which saw several buildings set alight on both the Pietermaritzburg and Durban campuses. Condemning, the incidents, the Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, said “These attacks look like well-orchestrated acts of sabotage and criminality meant to undermine and reverse the already achieved milestones reached with the South African Union of Students.”

Ignoring the loutish behaviour of Julius Malema and the EFF, President Cyril Ramaphosa implored South Africans to “…not allow fear to stand in our way” in his annual State of the Nation Address (SONA) to Parliament. While his national call to action contained some positive announcements, the fear remains that with state finances in dire straits, the economy all but ground to a halt and state companies floundering, the president will allow himself to remain captured by party dogma and constrained by indecision.

Former President, Jacob Zuma, continued to use every trick in the book to avoid his day of reckoning in court, charged with corruption. Having presented a sick note to excuse his absence – it was rejected by Judge Dhaya Pillay of the Supreme Court because the dates appeared to have been altered – Zuma then went on to accuse the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) of employing Apartheid-era tactics against him.

He also insisted that these were not deliberate delaying tactics on his part…

A proposal to cut the state’s wage bill by R160,2 billion over the next three years as Treasury warns of ever-rising debt repayments, was one of the key announcements of the 2020 budget, presented by Finance Minister, Tito Mboweni. The move was immediately opposed by the Public Services Union (PSA) who vowed to fight any threat to freeze public servants’ salary increases.

The Lights go out Again: Cartoons for September and October, 2019

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SUMMARY:

International concern continued to mount as thousands of fires broke out in Brazil, many in the world’s biggest rain forests, sending clouds of smoke across the region and pumping alarming amounts of carbon in to the world’s atmosphere. This was followed, shortly afterwards, by the unfolding devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian as it swept through the Bahamas and the eastern US seaboard, leaving thousands homeless and many dead.

None of this appeared to make any impression on US President Donald Trump, who continued on his quest to repeal the country’s environmental protection laws.

In a week best forgotten, South Africa’s international image took a huge dent as a wave of xenophobic attacks swept through the country. At the same time thousands of men and women all over South Africa took to the streets to signify unity and disgust against the ongoing violence and abuse against women and children.

There was slightly more encouraging news on my door step. Having got rid of the mayoral team for Msunduzi, the ANC next ordered the City’s top brass to act on officials implicated in graft. Seeing is, of course, believing but one can but hope…

In response to widespread protests across the country, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that R1,1Billion will be redirected to be used in the fight against gender-based violence and femicide. A firmer line certainly appeared necessary. As punishment for assaulting a female lecturer, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in its wisdom, decided merely that the offending student should step down from his position as SRC president and be given a suspended sentence barring him from the university for a limited period.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered a huge blow to his premiership after the Supreme Court ruled that his five-week suspension of Parliament was unlawful. Seemingly undeterred, Johnson would go on to taunt his rivals, on his return to Parliament, goading them to either bring down his government or get out of the way and allow it to deliver Brexit.

Back in South Africa, the government continued with its plans to pass a National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill which would provide quality universal health care in South Africa. Although good in intention, the inconvenient truth, in the view of many of its critics, is that even with the most conservative assumptions the country simply doesn’t have the tax base to support the promises that have been tabled.

While Pietermaritzburg choked on the toxic fumes spewing from its burning dump, the MEC for Environmental Affairs, Nomusa Dube-Ncube, huffed and puffed about ‘how to penalise those found to be in breach with the environmental laws”. She didn’t need to look far, the New England Road landfill site being a testament to the egregious dereliction of City Hall. Her own ministry bore some responsibility, too, for not fulfilling its oversight role.

Eskom’s ‘no more black-out’ promises turned out to be yet more hot air when they abruptly re-introduced load-shedding; a move which caused widespread public anger. With this spectre continuing to hang over the country the chances of the economy growing significantly appear slight.

The double resignation of the opposition Democratic Alliance’s senior leaders, Mamusi Maimane and federal chair Athol Trollope – which followed on from the earlier departure of City of Johannesburg mayor, Herman Mashaba – left the party in disarray and deeply divided. Their resignations appear to have been sparked by the return of former party leader, Helen Zille, who had been elected federal party chair. Speculation was rife that more resignations and defections would follow.

And Then The Lights Went Out – Cartoons for March and April, 2019

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SUMMARY OF EVENTS:

Other than the fact he fainted while delivering it, there was nothing especially memorable about KZN premier Willies Mchunu’s State of the Province Address so instead of going with that as my cartoon topic I decided to kick off March, 2019, by tackling a subject that has really got the long suffering residents of Pietermaritzburg blowing their fuses – the city’s chaotic electricity billing system.

They had good reason for concern. Shortly after the latest fiasco the Auditor General issued a damning report warning that the city was on the brink of collapse.

As if this was not bad enough the situation was then made worse when workers in the crucial Finance Department, who administer the billing system, suddenly downed tools and embarked on a strike. According to sources within the ANC itself the pro-Zuma faction – who else? – had encouraged these labour ructions as part of a grand plan to make the city’s management look incompetent.

Meanwhile, at the national level, a bombshell report recommended that the self-same Jacob Zuma and others be prosecuted or disciplined after finding that he oversaw the creation of parallel structures within the intelligence services to serve his personal and factional ANC interests.

If there is one thing the former Number One has proved singularly adept at doing it is avoiding going to jail so don’t be surprised if he does so again…

South Africans then found themselves back in the dark with Eskom power supply becoming increasingly erratic, and blackouts often inexplicable. The sudden wave of Stage Four outages brutally brought home the true severity of the mess South Africa has been dumped in by the kleptocrats.

The gloom continued with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s anti-corruption campaign getting tainted by the revelation that his son, Andile, was paid R2Million by Bosasa/African Global Operations. Andile’s exploitation of his connections drew immediate comparisons with the dodgy dealings of Zuma and his family during the previous presidency.

We were not the only ones sinking deeper in to the mire. With her Brexit deal having been rejected three times by the House of Commons, embattled British PM, Theresa May, decided to reach out to the Leader of the Labour opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, in an effort to resolve the impasse. It was hard not to take the cynical view that she had only done so because she realised she had run out of road.

Having insisted, through her spokesperson, that she had no plans to place the Msunduzi Municipality under administration because of the awful mess it had got itself in to the MEC for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Nomusa Dube-Ncube, then went ahead and did just that. Whether this belated “intervention”, as Dube-Ncube called it, will save the sinking ship is open to debate but the fact the beleaguered municipality has been placed under administration before – in 2010 – is not exactly an encouraging omen…

A tough task got made even more difficult for Sibusiso Sithole, the newly appointed administrator, when a group of ANC rebels then threatened to close down Msunduzi and other municipalities if their demands are not met before the election of May 8.

Since this occurred in the same week as Durban and the KZN coastline experienced some of the worst flooding in decades, I made the inevitable connection between the two events…

  • More billing woes
  • Heading for the cliff.
  • More revelations about Zuma.
  • More load-shedding.
  • More state capture revelations.
  • Going nowhere slowly…
  • Musunduzi finally placed under administration.
  • More ANC infighting.

More Cartoons from 2018

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Here is another selection of my political cartoons from 2018. Besides providing a pictorial history of some of the people, ideas and events that helped shape the year they will also, hopefully, give some clues as to where we may be headed in 2019.

Our erstwhile Number One, for example, has shown little inclination to emulate his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, by fading quietly in to the background – so it almost inevitable we will be hearing a lot more about Jacob Zuma. You can take it as read, too, that Julius Malema and the EFF will continue to push the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour and that Eskom will make the news for all the wrong reasons. Likewise, SAA, SABC and all our cash-strapped, disintegrating municipalities.

There will also be more stories about corruption and the misuse of public funds.

Another opportunity to practice my craft…

Internationally, you can rely on US President Donald Trump to keep banging on about his wretched Wall with Mexico while Britain will still be foundering on the rocks of Brexit.

If nothing else they will all provide abundant material for political cartoonists to practice their art…

So watch this space…

  • Jacob Zuma struggles to accept his days as the President of South Africa are numbered.
  • New President Cyril Ramaphosa doesn’t quite complete the job.
  • US President Donald Trump’s twin obsessions.
  • The DA loses some of the moral high ground with its mishandling of the Patricia De Lille affair.
  • Msunduzi’s long-suffering residents face more problems with their underperforming municipality.
  • NHI – big on ambition, lacking in detail.
  • Ex-President Jacob Zuma continues to live a charmed life
  • Consumers feel the squeeze after a VAT hike.
  • Uncertainty over the land issue continues to weigh down the economy.
  • Service delivery fails to improve.
  • EFF leader, Julius Malema, gets hoisted on his own petard.
  • President Cyril Ramaphosa faces some big decisions…