Daily Maverick following another round of load shedding, the central thrust of which was a call to trade unions – and indeed other civil society formations – to go beyond simply demanding salary increments and start envisioning a new power production and ownership model for South Africa.
I argued that as Eskom prepares to split into three entities (generation, transmission and distribution), unions, which played a pivotal role in bringing the apartheid regime to its knees and ushering in a new era of democracy, and which still wield a lot of power and influence today, have to advocate for more democratic ownership of electricity production as well as more green power, given today’s climate imperatives. They have to lead the clarion call for greater inclusion of as many willing and able South Africans as possible in future independent power producer (IPP) deals that materialise as unbundling becomes a reality.