There’s something to be said about sowing seeds before it rains, but nobody ever tells you how to prepare for a drought.
The phrase “when it rains, it pours” unfortunately doesn’t come with a drought equivalent, so for the time being, saying “when it dries, it’s arid“, doesn’t quite capture the severity.
Never mind-we won’t have to imagine a phrase if we’re about to live it.
Sadly, playing the “I told you so” card can come across as doomsaying, but the petrol hike in the forthcoming days is going to expose a stack of doom for a stack of people.
Sins of our fathers
What’s this got to do with previous administrations?
Decisions made back then and attempts to fix their consequences are going to impact an array of basic things that influence us all.
How much diesel are we burning to avoid load shedding? That’s just one example that brings about so many resultant questions…
What will a 20% increase in the diesel price do to the electricity supply and cost? What will increased diesel prices mean to farming and the cost of food? What will it mean for food security in an already food-insecure environment?
Tell me about the impact it will have on the industry and the employment of seasonal workers and independent contractors. The knock-on effects of this impending price shock are scary to even speculate, let alone realise.
And yet, all this stems from increased dependence on foreign fuel when we have a whole Sasol that pioneered commercial synthetic fuel out of low-grade coal.
We have piles of low-grade coal, and we even have mines that can get it out of the ground. But the rail infrastructure collapsed, so we can’t move the stuff, and investment in Sasol tech never really seemed prioritised of late.
And energy? We spent so much time fighting over some idea of a Russian nuclear plant proposal that cost more than four Medupis, we ditched our pebble bed tech, spent five times more than China on a coal station and let the choo-choos we use to move the coal kinda just like, erm, stop.
To be fair, we did put up some 1 500 wind turbines over 34 stations in the 2010s, and clean energy has become about 13% of our mix.
But that hasn’t meant that we’ve had to stop burning diesel because, for whatever reason, we can’t burn coal.
Kenya manages to get more than 15% of its electricity supply from a single wind station. Djibouti..yes, it’s tiny, but despite not having any wind turbines in 2022, it now satisfies around half of its demand from wind.
Meanwhile, back in Mzanzi, we’re languishing behind trying to patch up the problems we created for ourselves with little sight on investing in the future and now…well here we are faced with an oil crisis that will impact every industry that totally could have been avoided if only we had it in us to make a plan to be less reliant on foreign oil.
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Invest first, speak later
There was a lot of big talk about not needing this country or that country to help us, and that we could stand on our own and pick our own allies, but you can only make those claims if you are willing to invest in your own.
But not us, no. We have better things to do than invest in infrastructure and its effective use.
Remember the glory days when minister Joemat-Pettersson diligently “rotated” 10 million barrels at the discounted price of $29 a piece? That is the kind of thing we were dealing with instead of making sure that PetroSA has feedstock.
This is not a looming energy crisis only. This is the effect of awful governance over decades, finding expression in no more rabbits to pull out of hats.
Now go fill your tanks like it’s March 2020 and you need toilet paper.
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