15 December 2008
By Derek Luyt
ESKOM might have decided to shelve its R700billion nuclear energy expansion programme, but there remain lots of good reasons why the public should be more actively involved in deciding energy policy in South Africa.
For a start, the Eskom load-shedding fiasco, which still hangs over the country, should remind us that the mandarins can get it wrong. Despite knowing more than a decade ago that SA was heading towards an energy shortage, government could not avert a crisis.
It may well be that there were vested interests involved, coupled with a belief that investors would be found to bring nuclear energy on stream in time to alleviate the looming crunch. We may never know for sure what led to the crisis, but what is quite clear is that government failed to respect the right of the South African public to participate meaningfully in the critical issue of our country’s future energy policy.
The public simply cannot afford to allow this situation to continue. We need to insist on the right to participate in the formulation of energy policy in our country because whatever policy gets adopted and implemented will have profound effects on all South Africans for decades to come.
The energy policy implemented in SA will have a major impact, for example, on efforts to eradicate the poverty which currently blights the lives of far too many citizens. It is imperative that such policy maximizes job creation and enhances opportunities for the improvement of the quality of life of the poor majority.
The issue of nuclear power is central to any consideration of future energy policy. Nuclear power is enormously expensive and there are coherent arguments that it is not cost effective, does not create the kind and number of jobs that our country desperately needs and that it poses unacceptable environmental risks.
Renewable energy, in the considered opinion of some, offers better prospects for job creation than conventional or nuclear energy. For a country with unemployment rates so high, this alone makes renewable energy worthy of far greater investment. But, as Liz McDaid points out, the main obstacle to developing renewable energy in SA is the “lack of political will to transform Eskom”. Hence civil society must “play a major role in lobbying government for change in the energy sector”.
The deputy director-general of the Department of Public Enterprise (DPE), Nelly Magubane, last week stated that “renewable energy is definitely on the cards … we are actually looking at ways of making sure that we get even more renewable energy in the system”. While this is encouraging, and although Eskom has postponed immediate plans for Nuclear One procurement – because, according to Portia Molefe, DPE director-general, “it is not affordable to Eskom” – it has made it clear that nuclear power remains firmly on its long-term agenda. According to Molefe, government “remains committed to introducing nuclear”.
This commitment has been made without any meaningful public participation, and none of the 26 comments recently submitted on the Nuclear Energy Bill have been made public.
Vast amounts of money – about R345bn – will be ploughed into developing energy infrastructure in SA over the next five years. While government has committed about R60bn towards these costs, Eskom is currently negotiating a 5bn (about R50bn) loan from the World Bank to help fund its expansion. It has already secured a 500 million (about R5bn) loan from the African Development Bank.
ANC leader Jacob Zuma, who last week said he and the ANC “are very concerned about the level of corruption in government and we must do something radical about it”, would presumably understand public concern that the amounts of money being pumped into energy development in SA provide fertile grounds for corruption.
The public would rightfully be even more concerned were Eskom to implement an offset based nuclear procurement policy, which seems, finances allowing, probable.
Despite such concerns, nothing especially radical is needed to ensure that SA’s energy policy does not degenerate into a carnival of elite enrichment. A healthy dose of public participation, coupled with legislated oversight and accountability, will be enough.
The public should therefore insist that both Eskom and the World Bank conduct its negotiations openly and transparently. After all, what is being considered is essentially a loan to the people of SA, and we have a right to know what the conditions of the loan are, since we will be repaying it.
The public should also insist that the World Bank, which is committed to promoting transparent and accountable governance, and the government of SA, which is constitutionally obliged to promote transparent and participatory policy-making, make any loan to Eskom conditional on guarantees of meaningful public participation in the formulation of SA’s future energy policy.
Finally, the public should also insist that both parties ensure that the terms and conditions of any loan are transparent, allowing both Parliament and the public to hold Eskom accountable for its use of such funds.
The arms deal may have taken the public by surprise. We still don’t know the extent of corruption involved in the procurement of the weapons involved. Nor do we have accurate information on the offsets which apparently persuaded our government that the deal was good for the country. We are not even sure that we needed the arms in the first place.
What we do know is that the public was not involved in deciding any of these matters. Vested interests took these costly decisions on our behalf. We dare not let our future energy policy become a hugely expanded repeat of the arms deal. There is a lot more at stake than keeping the pool pumps running.
Derek Luyt is media and advocacy head for the Public Service Accountability Monitor
Source: Daily Despatch Insight
