Speculation is reaching fever pitch our president will soon address us on the electricity crisis. In fact, he might even declare a state of emergency. Who knows?
It is no longer ironic, but rather profoundly worrying, that a man who appeared so often, so resolutely and so visibly during the pandemic that his addresses to the nation were dubbed “family meetings”, has yet to directly utter anything. Yet this is a crisis that has the potential to wreak worse and more lasting hardship on the nation than Covid-19 could.
What, some cynics might ask, is the purpose of declaring a state of emergency over Eskom? It might be precisely what the leadership of the embattled utility needs: carte blanche to do its job, attract the right people with skills and root out the corrupt patronage networks bleeding it dry.
Such a state might empower law enforcement agencies to find, arrest and prosecute the Eskom employees who have been engaged in acts of sabotage at the power stations to force management to give them increases or pander to the desires of the RET-istas who are hell-bent on resisting any change to the status quo.
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