Watching the calamity unfold at Eskom has exposed the limitations of the current regime to be able to juggle the demands of its citizens and those “state capture” entrepreneurs who in effect underwrite the party and its lavish lifestyle. The challenge for our current president is not to try to remain significant, but rather to avoid being labelled a “Zuma lite” — an empty suit with a disposition of a disproportionate lifestyle. The mandarins at Luthuli House should heed JF Kennedy’s famous idiom: "Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside”.
What Ramaphosa should expound is not more rhetoric — he has abused every opportunity he had to be taken for his word — but how Eskom will be carved up for those who have the skills and capital to run the utility to sustain the reasonable growth rate South Africans so desperately require. The sooner he does this the sooner he saves his own party from dishonour.
US economist John Galbraith said it best: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
John Catsicas
Via email
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