Is Putin to blame for rolling blackouts?

In Eskom-inflicted darkness, don’t lose sight of wider things. Vladimir Putin, leader of the world’s biggest nuclear power, last week publicly threatened to use nuclear weapons.

And his mobilisation of 300 000 reservists needs perspective. On only two previous occasions has Moscow taken such a step: at the outbreak of WWI in 1914 and to counter Hitler’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has assumed ominous proportions. Sham referendums in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian areas of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are seen by the West as a ruse, paving the way for Russian escalation.

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“By incorporating the four areas, Moscow could portray attacks to retake them as an attack on Russia itself – potentially using that to justify even a nuclear response”, says Reuters. The involvement there of the lightweight ANC Youth League (ANCYL) as referendum observers is bizarre.

With Brics partners China and India cooling towards Putin, he is running out of friends. Ukraine listed countries which sent referendum observers: Belarus, Syria, Egypt, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay, Togo and South Africa. Once again South Africa is on the wrong side of history.

International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor entrenched that position with a fatuous speech at the United Nations last week. With its partisan stance on Ukraine, the ANC is not an impartial observer. The ANCYL is doubly compromised with its history of disputed voting procedures.

The disorganised ANCYL has been run by a task team for years and was temporarily disbanded in 2018 after failing to elect a new leader. These are not paragons of voting rectitude who can sit in judgment of others.

Yet there may be a connection between all this and the rolling power blackouts ruining our lives. In November last year, this column suggested that Putin might still be looking for returns on a down payment he is alleged to have made to former president Jacob Zuma for a nuclear power deal with South Africa.

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The same dynamics could still be at play. Just last week, there were reports of “confusion about a proposed plan by the eThekwini municipality to wean itself off Eskom supply by pursuing independent nuclear power”.

The News24 report quoted researcher Alex Lenferna as saying: “The municipality is governed by the RET faction of the ANC, which has long been in bed with coal and nuclear lobbies”.

Zuma remains a leading RET (radical economic transformation) figure. RET sympathisers within Eskom would have no problem sabotaging the power supply if that would help make a stronger case for nuclear energy to provide a more stable base load.

Putin to the rescue. In 2018, Prof Mark Swilling wrote that “build- ing a nuclear power plant in South Africa is [Russia’s] top foreign policy goal”. Putin’s foreign policy goals may have shifted but he may not have given up on an SA nuclear contract.

The ANC stands to benefit from such a deal, hence the reluctance to condemn the most dangerous person on the planet. Even when he rattles the cage of mutually assured destruction inherent in his threat to use nuclear weapons