# Interest group forums > Electrical Contracting Industry Forum > Electrical Load Shedding Forum >  Scottish News Article on SA

## Alan

SUNDAY HERALD 


Scotland's Award Winning Independent Newspaper 


February 24th, 2008 


Wounded Nation 


The lights are literally and figuratively going out all over
South Africa as crime, corruption
and mismanagement push the rainbow country towards becoming
another failed african state. By
Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg 


AFTER BATHING in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South
Africans today are deeply
demoralised people. The lights are going out in homes, mines,
factories and shopping malls as
the national power authority, Eskom - suffering from
mismanagement, lack of foresight, a
failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled
engineers to other countries -
implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into
daily chaos.


Major industrial projects are on hold. The only healthy
enterprise now worth being involved in
is the sale of small diesel generators to powerless households
but even this business has run
out of supplies and spare parts from China. 


The currency, the rand, has entered freefall. Crime, much of it
gratuitously violent, is
rampant, and the national police chief faces trial for corruption
and defeating the ends of
justice as a result of his alleged deals with a local mafia
kingpin and dealer in hard drugs.


Newly elected African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma,
the state
president-in-waiting, narrowly escaped being jailed for raping an
HIV-positive woman last year,
and faces trial later this year for soliciting and accepting
bribes in connection with South
Africa's shady multi-billion-pound arms deal with British, German
and French weapons
manufacturers. 


One local newspaper columnist suggests that Zuma has done for
South Africa's international
image what Borat has done for Kazakhstan. ANC leaders in 2008
still speak in the spiritually
dead jargon they learned in exile in pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin
and Sofia while promiscuously
embracing capitalist icons - Mercedes 4x4s, Hugo Boss suits,
Bruno Magli shoes and Louis
Vuitton bags which they swing, packed with money passed to them
under countless tables - as
they wing their way to their houses in the south of France. 


It all adds up to a hydra-headed crisis of huge proportions - a
perfect storm as the Rainbow
Nation slides off the end of the rainbow and descends in the
direction of the massed ranks of
failed African states. Eskom has warned foreign investors with
millions to sink into big
industrial and mining projects: we don't want you here until at
least 2013, when new power
stations will be built. 


In the first month of this year, the rand fell 12% against the
world's major currencies and
foreign investors sold off more than ÃÂ£600 million worth of South
African stocks, the biggest
sell-off for more than seven years. 


"There will be further outflows this month, because there won't
be any news that will convince
investors the local growth picture is going to change for the
better," said Rudi van der Merwe,
a fund manager at South Africa's Standard Bank. 


Commenting on the massive power cuts, Trevor Gaunt, professor of
electrical engineering at the
University of Cape Town, who warned the government eight years
ago of the impending crisis,
said: "The damage is huge, and now South Africa looks just like
the rest of Africa. Maybe it
will take 20 years to recover." 


The power cuts have hit the country's platinum, gold, manganese
and high-quality export coal
mines particularly hard, with no production on some days and only
40% to 60% on others.


"The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary,
unprecedented event," said Anton
Eberhard, a leading energy expert and professor of business
studies at the University of Cape
Town. 


"That's a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa's
reputation for new investment.
Our country was built on the mines." 


To examine how the country, widely hailed as Africa's last best
chance, arrived at this parlous
state, the particular troubles engulfing the Scorpions (the
popular name of the National
Prosecuting Authority) offers a useful starting point. 


The elite unit, modelled on America's FBI and operating in close
co-operation with Britain's
Serious Fraud Office (SFO), is one of the big successes of
post-apartheid South Africa. An
independent institution, separate from the slipshod South African
Police Service, the Scorpions
enjoy massive public support. 


The unit's edict is to focus on people "who commit and profit
from organised crime", and it has
been hugely successful in carrying out its mandate. It has
pursued and pinned down thousands of
high-profile and complex networks of national and international
corporate and public
fraudsters. 


Drug kingpins, smugglers and racketeers have felt the Scorpions'
sting. A major gang that
smuggle platinum, South Africa's biggest foreign exchange earner,
to a corrupt English smelting
plant has been bust as the result of a huge joint operation
between the SFO and the Scorpions.
But the Scorpions, whose top men were trained by Scotland Yard,
have been too successful for
their own good. 


The ANC government never anticipated the crack crimebusters would
take their constitutional
independence seriously and investigate the top ranks of the
former liberation movement itself.


The Scorpions have probed into, and successfully prosecuted, ANC
MPs who falsified their
parliamentary expenses. They secured a jail sentence for the
ANC's chief whip, who took bribes
from the German weapons manufacturer that sold frigates and
submarines to the South African
Defence Force. They sent to jail for 15 years a businessman who
paid hundreds of bribes to then
state vice-president Jacob Zuma in connection with the arms deal.
Zuma was found by the judge
to have a corrupt relationship with the businessman, and now the
Scorpions have charged Zuma
himself with fraud, corruption, tax evasion, racketeering and
defeating the ends of justice.
His trial will begin in August. 


The Scorpions last month charged Jackie Selebi, the national
police chief, a close friend of
state president Thabo Mbeki, with corruption and defeating the
ends of justice. Commissioner
Selebi, who infamously called a white police sergeant a "f***ing
chimpanzee" when she failed to
recognise him during an unannounced visit to her Pretoria
station, has stepped down pending his
trial. 


But now both wings of the venomously divided ANC - ANC-Mbeki and
ANC-Zuma - want the Scorpions
crushed, ideally by June this year. The message this will send to
the outside world is that
South Africa's rulers want only certain categories of crime
investigated, while leaving
government ministers and other politicians free to stuff their
already heavily lined pockets.


No good reason for emasculating the Scorpions has been put
forward. "That's because there isn't
one," said Peter Bruce, editor of the influential Business Day,
South Africa's equivalent of,
and part-owned by, The Financial Times, in his weekly column. 


"The Scorpions are being killed off because they investigate too
much corruption that involves
ANC leaders. It is as simple and ugly as that," he added. 


The demise of the Scorpions can only exacerbate South Africa's
out-of-control crime situation,
ranked for its scale and violence only behind Colombia. Everyone
has friends and acquaintances
who have had guns held to their heads by gangsters, who also blow
up ATM machines and hijack
security trucks, sawing off their roofs to get at the cash. 


In the past few days my next-door neighbour, John Matshikiza, a
distinguished actor who trained
at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the son of the composer
of the South African musical
King Kong, had been violently attacked, and friends visiting from
Zimbabwe had their car stolen
outside my front window in broad daylight.

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## Alan

*Part 2*[too long to fit into 1 post]

My friends flew home to Zimbabwe without their car and the tinned
food supplies they had bought
to help withstand their country's dire political and food crisis
and 27,000% inflation.
Matshikiza, a former member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre
company, was held up by three
gunmen as he drove his car into his garage late at night. He gave
them his car keys, wallet,
cellphone and luxury watch and begged them not to harm his
partner, who was inside the house.


As one gunman drove the car away, the other two beat Matshikiza
unconscious with broken
bottles, and now his head is so comprehensively stitched that it
looks like a map of the London
Underground. 


These assaults were personal, but mild compared with much
commonplace crime.


Last week, for example, 18-year-old Razelle Botha, who passed all
her A-levels with marks of
more than 90% and was about to train as a doctor, returned home
with her father, Professor
Willem Botha, founder of the geophysics department at the
University of Pretoria, from buying
pizzas for the family. Inside the house, armed gunmen confronted
them. They shot Professor
Botha in the leg and pumped bullets into Razelle. 


One severed her spine. Now she is fighting for her life and will
never walk again, and may
never become a doctor. The gunmen stole a laptop computer and a
camera.


Feeding the perfect storm are the two centres of ANC power in the
country at the moment. On the
one hand, there is the ANC in parliament, led by President Mbeki,
who last Friday gave a
state-of-the-nation address and apologised to the country for the
power crisis.


Mbeki made only the briefest of mentions of the national Aids
crisis, with more than six
million people HIV-positive. He did not address the Scorpions
crisis The collapsing public
hospital system, under his eccentric health minister Manto
Tshabalala-Msimang, an alcoholic who
recently jumped the public queue for a liver transplant, received
no attention. And the name
Jacob Zuma did not pass his lips. 


Last December Mbeki and Zuma stood against each other for the
leadership of the ANC at the
party's five-yearly electoral congress. Mbeki, who cannot stand
again as state president beyond
next year's parliamentary and presidential elections, hoped to
remain the power behind the
throne of a new state president of his choosing. 


Zuma, a Zulu populist with some 20 children by various wives and
mistresses, hoped to prove
that last year's rape case, and the trial he faces this year for
corruption and other charges,
were part of a plot by Mbeki to use state institutions to
discredit him. Mbeki assumed that the
notion of Zuma assuming next year the mantle worn by Nelson
Mandela as South Africa's first
black state president would be so appalling to delegates, a
deeply sad and precipitous decline,
that his own re-election as ANC leader was a shoo-in. 


But Mbeki completely miscalculated his own unpopularity - his
perceived arrogance, failure to
solve health and crime problems, his failure to deliver to the
poor - and he lost. Now Zuma
insists that he is the leader of the country and ANC MPs in
parliament must take its orders
from him, while Mbeki soldiers on until next year as state
president, ordering MPs to toe his
line. 


Greatly understated, it is a mess. Its scale will be dramatically
illustrated if South Africa's
hosting of the 2010 World Cup is withdrawn by Fifa, the world
football body.


Already South African premier league football evening games are
being played after midnight
because power for floodlights cannot be guaranteed before that
time. Justice Malala, one of the
country's top newspaper columnists, has called on Fifa to end the
agony quickly.


"I don't want South Africa to host the football World Cup because
there is no culture of
responsibility in this country," he wrote in Johannesburg's
bestselling Sunday Times.


"The most outrageous behaviour and incompetence is glossed over.
No-one is fired. I have had
enough of this nonsense, of keeping quiet and ignoring the fact
that the train is about to run
us over. 


"It is increasingly clear that our leaders are incapable of
making a success of it. Scrap the
thing and give it to Australia, Germany or whoever will spare us
the ignominy of watching
things fall apart here - football tourists being held up and
shot, the lights going out, while
our politicians tell us everything is all right."

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## Dave A

I don't know if I'd call this objective journalism - but that's quite a litany of problems back to back.



> foreign investors sold off more than ÃÂ£600 million worth of South
> African stocks, the biggest
> sell-off for more than seven years.


I didn't know that.  :Huh:

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## duncan drennan

As people here, do you really experience the country in the same way that it is being described?

I experience it quite differently. Yes, there are challenges (there always are, even in the most developed countries), but many are ones which will pass (such as the energy crisis). Yes, there are looming challenges (water comes to mind).

There are only two things that bother me, and only one is a realised issue. Firstly, crime (and the particularly violent and abusive kind we seem to experience). Second is freedom of expression, particularly for the media (there are threats to that freedom, but so far they have not materialised - and I don't believe they will). Those are the two issues that I watch closely.

Painting the whole country with the "deepest darkest Africa" brush is really just quite boring - we have a far more interesting and diverse personality than that.

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## twinscythe12332

> the national power authority, Eskom - suffering from
> mismanagement, lack of foresight, a
> failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled
> engineers to other countries -
> implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into
> daily chaos.


one of the guys I work with used to work for the city. Eskom's engineers and foreplanners said 10 years ago "in 10 years we are going to need a new power plant, infrastructure, etc." the government supposedly took over, saying it would turn it into a BEE deal. just never happened. now governement is trying to look the hero.

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## Dave A

Yeah. This part in particular really killed the credibility as objective journalism for me.



> Zuma, a Zulu populist with some 20 children by various wives and
> mistresses, hoped to prove
> that last year's rape case, and the trial he faces this year for
> corruption and other charges,
> were part of a plot by Mbeki to use state institutions to
> discredit him. Mbeki assumed that the
> notion of Zuma assuming next year the mantle worn by Nelson
> Mandela as South Africa's first
> black state president would be so appalling to delegates, a
> ...


Definitely a very coloured view.

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## twinscythe12332

well, let's face it, the writer went out to try injure the pride of SA (or the little we have left). the worse it could sound, the better.

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