Nicola’s Notes: What’s in a name?

Calling a thorn by a sweeter sounding name is just papering over economic cracks, and South Africans deserve better, argues Nicola Mawson.

South Africa has, as we all know, managed to escape being downgraded to junk by the skin of its teeth, as that old cliche goes.

Two ratings agencies - S&P and Fitch - have basically given SA until year-end to sort itself out and put the country on a growth path. And that’s what we seem to be doing, with all stakeholders pulling together for the greater good.

Only time will tell, and I imagine we’ll get a progress report come mini-budget in October.

What stood out in the agencies’ statements on SA, however, was the role played by Eskom in stabilising the electricity grid.

Fitch, the latest agency to affirm SA’s rating at a notch above junk - scraping in at investment grade - noted in its statement that the government has made progress in addressing power supply problems.

It notes there has been no load shedding so far this year as maintenance management has improved and additional renewable power sources have been added to the grid, although new units from the Kusile and Medupi coal-fired power stations will only come online in 2018.

S&P said pretty much the same, noting Eskom has improved the energy supply through a better maintenance programme, managing demand in peak periods, and by additions from its new power plants and from independent power producers. “Energy sector improvements will likely reduce some of the economic bottlenecks.”

Eskom, unsurprisingly, welcomed S&P’s rating affirmation and confirmation that it is making strides.

The utility also peppers media with just how stable the grid is, with lines like these adorning the top of every press release: “Eskom is progressing well with the maintenance of its power generating plant whilst supplying the country’s electricity needs. No load shedding has been implemented for the past ten months.”

I know quite a few people who would beg to differ. People who live on Joburg’s north, west and north-west sides. And, given how long 702’s traffic report was earlier this week, I suspect Aki Anastasiou would be among them, given that it would have been quicker to tell listeners which areas had power than which ones didn’t, and were suffering from traffic jams.

Given that we haven’t had load shedding for 10 months and counting, that’s not the culprit. Maybe it’s the maintenance of which Eskom speaks?

Maybe it’s an outage that City Power is dealing with?

Who knows.

The point is - there is no power. And calling it downtime or an outage instead of load shedding is really just semantics.

People get stuck in traffic when there is no power, factories can’t work, companies spend more to run generator sets, the list of economic fallouts goes on almost endlessly.

Papering over the cracks in our economic infrastructure - water is another example - will not change the reality that South Africans face.

We need to be honest and admit we just have not done enough over the past two decades to keep the economic lights on. Which is why I fear that our 11th-hour unified attempt to stave off a downgrade is too little, too late, and six months isn’t enough time to fix anything.

We need straight talk, and honest answers, not euphemisms, if we are to get to the point where we have inclusive growth that creates jobs.

* Nicola Mawson is the online editor of Business Report. Follow her on Twitter @NicolaMawson or Business Report @busrep.

IOL