Month: July 2023

South Africans are experiencing worsening blackouts as winter hits and the crisis is fuelling demands for political change in Africa’s most-advanced economy.

Wiseman Bambatha was indulging in wishful thinking when he named his business Goodhope upholstery.

Mr Bambatha re-conditions sofas and chairs in a dingy, one-room workshop in the sprawling Khayelitsha township on the edge of Cape Town.

But for hours on end, his battered, electric sewing machine sits idle. The power is off in Khayelitsha for eight or 10 hours almost every day. In South Africa they call it load-shedding.

Orders are not being met, customers are angry.

Mr Bambatha grimaces and admits his business is hanging by a thread. It is a story being replayed across the country.

In an already dysfunctional economy, with half of all young adults unemployed, load-shedding is a jobs killer.

“The government has been promising us a better life for years,” says Mr Bambatha, surveying his potholed street, and a vista of corrugated shacks beyond. “Tell me, where is it?”

Khayelitsha is home to more than a million people. When night falls, and the power fails, it is enveloped in an eerie dark, punctuated by street-side braziers.

Cape Town already had the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of Africa – load-shedding and the absence of street lighting has added a new level of menace.

After sundown I meet Mr Bambatha’s wife, Ruby, huddled on a sofa with her two young daughters, all of them illuminated by a flickering candle.

“I always try to get home before dark, get the kids inside and lock the door – only then I feel safe,” she says.

And even in death, the power crisis is robbing South Africans of their dignity.

Juggling corpses

A man who runs a funeral parlour a couple of miles from Khayelitsha keeps bodies in a cold store behind his office.

“When the power is out for four hours we have a big problem,” he says. “The corpses start to decompose, you can imagine the smell. This is not something grieving families can accept.”

So the funeral director phones around his friends in the business. When he finds someone who has still got power and space in their cold store, he ferries his bodies to them.

Across Cape Town, corpses are being juggled every day in search of reliable power.

Load-shedding feels like the service delivery failure that could break the grip of the African National Congress (ANC) on power.

The specific reasons for the rolling blackouts are legion: obsolete coal-fired power stations; incompetent management at the state-owned energy company Eskom and rampant corruption.

But ultimately there is one stark political reality: the party of Nelson Mandela, which has monopolised power for 29 years since liberation from apartheid, owns this crisis.

I meet ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula five minutes after power and light come back on at Luthuli House, the party’s Johannesburg headquarters.

He used to revel in the nickname “Mr Fixit”. No-one seems to call him that now.

“Load-shedding could be our Achilles heel,” he acknowledges, with surprising candour. “It could cost us our majority.”

South Africans go to the polls next year. The poll ratings of the ANC and President Cyril Ramaphosa have been on the slide for months.

The party is vulnerable as never before, but only if voters have a credible alternative.

The leader of South Africa’s biggest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is John Steenhuisen.

His Cape Town office gives clues as to the scale of his ambition. There are photos of former US President John F Kennedy everywhere.

In a further nod to his political hero, Mr Steenhuisen promises me he will put together a “moonshot coalition” of a dozen opposition parties to bring down the ANC.

But Mr Steenhuisen is white in a country where white people constitute just 7% of the population. Two-thirds of his party members are white. So too are 70% of the faces in South Africa’s boardrooms.

No amount of DA talk about competence and meritocracy can mask the fact that South Africa is not a society that has left the trauma and systemic inequality of apartheid behind.

Which means that the most potent political force in the country right now may well be Julius Malema.

He was thrown out of the ANC more than a decade ago – party bigwigs told him to take anger-management classes following a slew of accusations of inciting race hate and violence.

He founded his own party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), committed to the nationalisation of land, the banks and the mines – in other words the key pillars of residual white economic power.

Mr Malema senses opportunity as the energy crisis worsens this winter.

“Let the grid collapse,” he tells me. “I’m not wishing for it but it is going to happen, and then people are going to rise – I’m telling you there’s going to be a revolution.”

The ANC has managed, or mismanaged, South Africa for the last 29 years.

A day of reckoning is fast approaching, and it promises to be painful.

Source: BBC

North West Acting Premier and Human Settlements MEC, Nono Maloyi, has called on the Bojanala District Municipality and departmental officials to investigate and submit a report with recommendations regarding all outstanding blocked housing projects.

The report should include blocked projects which were not covered on a preliminary report.

Maloyi visited the area this week to assess projects in the district, some of which are reported to be in existence for over 10 years and are expected to undergo further testing by the National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC).

During his visit, Maloyi introduced seven contractors to fast track the completion of the blocked projects and resolved some housing challenges in the district. The contractors will be introduced to ward councillors and community members.

He warned the contractors against shoddy work, non-performance and late completion of projects in the rural areas of the province.

The projects are expected to be completed by December 2023.

The MEC recommended the termination or downscaling of non-performing contractors, and called on the department to appoint contractors with capacity that will complete projects on time.

“We are hopeful and certain that appointed contractors will complete those projects on time. We are also monitoring performance and the quality of work done, [and] answering a call by people of the North West to build a sustainable human settlements for them,” Maloyi said.

Illegal occupation of houses

Maloyi raised his concern at the continuous illegal occupation of low cost houses and community residential units across the province.

He reiterated the commitment he made during his budget vote recently that the department, in collaboration with municipalities, will deal decisively with such invaders, in line with municipal bylaws, in order to restore the houses to their rightful beneficiaries.

Some of the areas dealing with illegal invasion include Marikana and Matlosana.

“We are concerned about the illegal occupation of houses built for our beneficiaries. Every house constructed in this province has a specific beneficiary,” said Maloyi.

The MEC and his team will this week visit the Dr Ruth Segomutsi Mompati District Municipality and continue to revisit other districts to monitor performance.

Source: South African Government News Agency

President Cyril Ramaphosa has signed off the remuneration increases for all Public Office Bearers for the 2022/23 financial year.

In a statement, the Presidency said that after consideration of the recommendations of the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office Bearers, the President has decided that the remuneration of all public office bearers will increase by 3% with effect from 01 April 2022.

The Commission had recommended 3.8% salary increment for all public office bearers, including members of the Independent Constitutional Institutions, Judges, Magistrates and Traditional Leaders for the financial year 2022/2023.

“Having considered the Commission’s recommendations and serious economic challenges facing the country, the President has decided that the salaries of all public office bearers be increased by three percent,” the Presidency said.

Public office bearers include the President, Deputy President, Ministers and Deputy Ministers, Members of Parliament and the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) as well as the leadership structures of the two houses, Premiers and MECs, members of the provincial legislature and their associated leadership structures, mayors and councillors, judges and magistrates and traditional leaders.

Magwenya said the President has in accordance to relevant statutory requirements submitted the notice to Parliament for approval before publication, particularly concerning salaries of judges and magistrates.

The President expressed his appreciation to the Independent Commission for its recommendations.

Public Protector’s report

Meanwhile, the Presidency has noted the report of the Acting Public Protector, Advocate Kholeka Gcaleka, which absolves the President of alleged abuse of power or breaches of the Executive Ethics Code in relation to an incident of theft at his privately-owned Phala Phala game farm in 2020.

“The President has always maintained that he was not party to any wrong doing or violation of his oath of office,” the Presidency said.

Source: South African Government News Agency

With the conclusion of Youth Month, government has called on business and civil society to partner in an effort to unlock pathways of earning for youth.

“In the spirit of ensuring that no one is left behind, government calls on all sectors of society to partner in an effort to unlock pathways of earning for the youth, so that they are able to lead sustainable lives,” said a statement issued by the Government Communication and Information System.

It said that as part of the continuous effort to ensure that the socio-economic needs of the youth are given priority by all, on Youth Day on 16 June 2023 government brought together business and civil society organisations to present entrepreneurial and employment opportunities that the youth can explore.

The programme included opportunities to engage with the youth through dialogues in order to better understand their challenges and barriers that they experience to fully participate in the economy.

Such efforts to mobilise society behind the youth are inspired by this years’ theme: “Accelerating collaborations and opportunities to improve the lives of the youth”.

“Government recognises that the future of South Africa rests upon the youth. As such, there is a need to pull all available resources, open up the economic space for the youth to participate economically and contribute to the growth of this country,” read the statement.

It is now 47 years since the 1976 student uprising upon which Youth Month and Youth Day Commemorations are founded.

Michael Currin, acting government spokesperson, said: “As South Africa continues to acknowledge the contribution made by the 1976 youth towards the liberation of this country, we ought to also realise that unless the current socio-economic challenges faced by today’s youth are resolved, the sacrifices of the 1976 group would have been in vain.

“We therefore call on all the sectors that came together on the Youth Day continue playing a role in lifting young people beyond this month of June 2023.”

Source: South African Government News Agency