Chairperson, hon Minister, Deputy Minister and esteemed colleagues and guests, this is, in fact, my maiden speech as a fully fledged DA Member of Parliament ... [Interjections.] ... and as convention would dictate, I am supposed to make it noncontroversial. It is not my intention to be controversial in any way, but merely to point out how we are going to resolve one of the most important challenges facing this country, namely our protracted energy crisis.
The DA is happy that the ANC-led government has finally recognised that we are in the midst of a major energy crisis, as expressed by the President in his state of the nation address. It's one thing admitting that we are in a crisis, but it is quite another to implement the sustainable solutions that would get us out of it.
As Einstein once said, you cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it. Unfortunately, that is precisely what I see happening in this instance. So, before we talk about solutions, let us first analyse the kind of ANC thinking that contributed to this crisis in the first place.
I have heard a great deal said about the NDP in these Budget Votes, but the manner in which the ANC dealt with the first NDP for the energy sector, namely the energy White Paper of 1998, gives us an indication of where things started to go wrong. This White Paper accurately predicted that we would experience blackouts in 2006 if new energy generation was not brought on stream. In order to create the conditions conducive for this to happen though, the White Paper strongly argued for Eskom's monopoly dominance to be broken through the introduction of a transmission systems operator that would take the transmission grid out of Eskom and place it in a separate independent entity. That was 15 years ago.
The ANC chose to ignore that part of the White Paper, just like it is conveniently ignoring those aspects of the NDP that do not fit snugly with its old outdated ideological thinking. Instead, the ANC-led government prevented Eskom from building any new generating plants while simultaneously refusing to reform the electricity sector in a way that would make it conducive for the private sector to enter this monopolistic market. This illogical approach by the ANC predictably led to the blackouts, which started in 2006, ushering in an electricity crisis that we are continuing to suffer until this day.
Over the past fifteen years, all we have seen from the ANC is what could best be described as a Rocky Horror time warp dance:
It's just a jump to the left And then a step to the right With your hands on your hips You bring your knees in tight
It all looks very impressive until you realise that we have just been dancing in the same spot for the past fifteen years, while the energy sector has fallen apart around us ... I will not take a question. It is a time warp, indeed.