2024: lights out for us, or ANC?
DIVINE YAMULAMBA
The electricity crisis resumes despite the opposition’s efforts to advocate for the termination of power cuts during the “national shutdown”.
On Monday, March 20, a multitude of protesters took charge of the streets in every one of South Africa’s capital cities – the Johannesburg and Pretoria CBDs grabbing the most media attention. They demanded the resignation of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the end of load shedding.
The demonstrations, which were staged by the opposition party, the EFF and the South African Federation of Trade Unions, served to highlight the government’s failure to address urgent issues affecting the state of the country. This included unemployment, high inflation rates, Eskom’s poor energy supply, escalated corruption in service delivery and crime.
The weekend before Human Rights Day, Eskom had announced that the suspension of load shedding would last until the afternoon of March 21. South Africans who have connected the “short break” to the EFF-led march across all nine provinces, have either praised the motive of the initiative to put pressure on the government because they believed the rally was what caused Eskom’s sudden lower demand for electricity, or have criticised the pan-Africanist political party for thinking it could reverse load shedding – a national problem that has been existing and worsening for years – in a day.
Among those who have contested against the link between Eskom’s notable improvement in its power generation and the EFF’s demonstration was the minister of electricity himself, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. He said steps towards controlling “the scale of the problem” were yet to be undertaken.
Both sides of the fence have agreed that this was by far the most peaceful EFF-led protest they had seen, unlike the widespread looting, burning and destruction of private and public property South Africa experienced during the violent July 9 to 17 riots in 2021. Before the shutdown demonstrations, there had been an avalanche of fear expressed by the public, who were worried that the socio-political unrest from two years ago, would reinvent itself on Monday and harm the declined economy even further.
The 2021 protest, which has been declared the worst unrest since the apartheid regime, had amounted to negative consequences that were severe in intensity and size, especially in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Reports from the South African Property Owners’ Association had shown that almost 40 000 businesses faced the risk of closing that year because of the infrastructural losses that came as a result of the looting.
The estimated cost to repair the damage was about R50 billion. However, to everyone’s surprise, none of the statistics were drawn from this year’s planned shutdown. Law and order had prevailed, thanks to two evident reasons: the millions of rand that were invested in the deployment of security forces and the proactive contribution of neighbourhood watch members who committed themselves to ensuring everyone’s safety.
Although a few commentators, from the DA to the ANC have claimed that the march was neither constitutional nor the resounding success EFF leader Julius Malema exclaimed it to be, especially following several arrests on the eve of the shutdown and the disruptions of small-scale business activities, what would qualify the demonstration as an achievement was the unity it fostered among South Africans.
It might be back to “normal”, with rotational power cuts on stage 2, but Monday’s protest showed that the people of South Africa are not oblivious to the challenges that affect them all, and will not complacently be subjected to a questionable governance. In his first State of the Nation Address, Ramaphosa had pledged to lead the country into a new dawn.
Six years into his term, the ANC’s promises have yielded minimal results, especially in light of the prevailing energy crisis. Many residents who have called the shutdown an urgent wake-up call for Ramaphosa’s reshuffled Cabinet, believe that uprisings such as this could be what it takes for them to revise the commitment the ANC made to serving the people of South Africa.
Since the start of the year, it is approximately 141 days since consecutive blackouts first shadowed the country in October 2022. The resumption of load shedding this week has proved that the results of a countrywide protest might not always be immediate, but the voiced concerns of the population are predicting how different next year’s elections will be.
Divine Yamulamba is a research intern at The Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, UJ.
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