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What needs to be done to POWER up South Africa?

07 September 2022 | Story Dr Nitha Ramnath

2022 UFS Thought-leader webinar series: What needs to be done to POWER up South Africa?

The University of the Free State is pleased to present its third webinar titled, What needs to be done to POWER up South Africa, which is part of the 2022 Thought-Leader Webinar Series. As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the webinar in collaboration with the Free State Literature Festival. The aim of the webinar series is to discuss issues facing South Africa by engaging experts at the university and in South Africa.

Third webinar presented on 27 September 2022

South Africa’s ageing coal power plants are the cause of massive power outages on a regular basis. A dire need exists to diversify our energy mix and to consider more renewable energy. Renewable energy is regarded far cheaper than coal and the construction of coal power plants. South Africa is well positioned environmentally, with the best wind and solar potential on the entire African continent. Economic viability and benefits accompany the exploitation of renewable energy, which will provide much-needed stability in South Africa.

Date: Tuesday 27 September 2022
Time: 12:30-14:00
RSVP: https://events.ufs.ac.za/e/2022UFSThoughtLeaderWebinarSeries by 25 September 2022.

For further information, contact Alicia Pienaar at pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za.

Some of the topics discussed by leading experts in 2021 included, among others, reimagining universities for student success; corruption in South Africa – the endemic pandemic; South African politics and the local government elections; is South Africa falling apart: where to from here; predications for 2022; and why vaccinate? This year’s webinar series commenced on 31 May 2022 with the topic Crime in South Africa – who is to blame? This was followed by a webinar held in July, which asked the question, Are our glasses half full or half empty?

Facilitator:

Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS

Panellists:

Nthato Minyuku

Group Executive
Government and Regulatory Affairs
Eskom

Steve Nicholls

Head of Mitigation
Presidential Climate Commission

Happy Khambule

Environment and Energy Manager
Business Unity South Africa (BUSA)

Louis Lagrange

Head: Department of Engineering Sciences
Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, UFS

Bios of speakers:

Nthato Minyuku

Ms Nthato Minyuku is Eskom’s Group Executive: Government and Regulatory Affairs responsible for positioning, advocacy, shared value, and unlocking constraints to value defence and growth. She joined Eskom in 2020 as part of the new executive team recruited by GCE André de Ruyter. She has an extensive track record as executive in various sectors, including energy, maritime oil and gas, infrastructure, and urban development.

In her previous roles, Minyuku was the former Corporate Affairs Executive for Shell South Africa, former Chief Economic Planner for the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission (PICC), former President of the South African Planning Institute (SAPI), and former member of the SA Council for Planners (SACPLAN) appointed by the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform.

She is currently the Board Chairperson of the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) appointed by the Minister of Transport. Passionate about women’s participation in the energy sector, she facilitates the Unleashing Leadership Potential (ULP) Women in Energy Forum.

Steve Nicholls

Steve Nicholls is the recently appointed Head of Mitigation in South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission. In this role, he works with a range of stakeholders to reach consensus on net-zero pathways for each sector of the economy built on a strong fact base, while supporting capacity building and cooperation within the modelling community in South Africa. Understanding future competitive economies and what kind of investments are required to enhance South Africa’s economic competitiveness while creating employment and reducing inequality and poverty will be his key focus. Nicholls maintains an ongoing advisory role to the National Business Initiative, supporting its Just Transition Pathways project.

Nicholls’ past experience is in connecting climate issues with economic impact, and therefore building the strategic case for integrating climate considerations into economic planning, strategy, risk management, investment planning, policy development and implementation.

Prior to joining the PCC, Nicholls led the Environment and Society programmes at the National Business Initiative. In this role, he ran the programmes that harnessed the collective effort of South African business across the areas of energy, climate change, and water. Nicholls has worked in the consulting industry in the United Kingdom and South Africa and has worked on projects in Europe and Southern and East Africa. He has worked across several sectors, including mining, telecommunications, government, electrical energy, oil and gas, financial services, and retail.

Happy Khambule

Khambule is the former Greenpeace Africa senior political adviser on climate and energy. He studied law at the University of Johannesburg and was recognised by the British Council as a Global Changemaker and International Climate Champion in 2008 and 2010. In 2013, he was selected as one of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans. Khambule is an official party delegate to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and negotiates various issues, such as Paris Agreement implementation and response measures. He serves on the Paris Agreement Compliance Committee and is a non-executive director in Mansa Advisory. He serves on various boards, including the Earthlife Africa board and the CleanCity SA board, as an independent non-executive board chairperson.

Khambule is part of the inaugural President's Coordinating Commission on Climate Change (PCC) and is Business Unity South Africa's Head of Environment and Energy.

Louis Lagrange

Louis Lagrange is an agricultural engineer, who is specialised in project management, food process engineering, and energy engineering. Lagrange is currently leading a team at the University of the Free State that has successfully established a new degree in Engineering Sciences. The establishment was followed by new research in energy efficiency. Lagrange is also leading the establishment of a new full Engineering degree in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, specialising in energy engineering, food process engineering, and environmental biosystems engineering.

Prior to joining the UFS, Lagrange spent seven years at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as Senior Lecturer in the School of Bio-resources Engineering and Environmental Hydrology. Here he focused on energy conversion through tractors, combine harvesters, and implements and developed the new food process engineering subjects.

Lagrange’s passion for education is also prevalent through the facilitation of strategic and scenario planning for groups and boards of directors, including the facilitation of certified energy manager, certified energy auditor, business efficiency professional, certified lighting efficiency professional, and fundamentals of energy management training over the past 12 years for Energy Cybernetics, the Energy Training Foundation, and currently for the Institute of Energy Professionals Africa. He also co-developed and is the trainer of the new Energy Audit Technician and Energy Performance Certificate training courses for South Africa.

In his previous roles, Lagrange was project manager: research and development and portfolio manager: food processing for Agrele, a subsidiary of Eskom. Here, he focused on the development, marketing, and implementation of innovative methods to utilise and stimulate the additional use of electricity in agriculture.

News Archive

Media: Sunday Times

2006-05-20

Sunday Times, 4 June 2006

True leadership may mean admitting disunity

In this edited extract from the inaugural King Moshoeshoe Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State, Professor Njabulo S Ndebele explores the leadership challenges facing South Africa

RECENT events have created a sense that we are undergoing a serious crisis of leadership in our new democracy. An increasing number of highly intelligent, sensitive and committed South Africans, across class, racial and cultural spectrums, confess to feeling uncertain and vulnerable as never before since 1994.

When indomitable optimists confess to having a sense of things unhinging, the misery of anxiety spreads. We have the sense that events are spiralling out of control and that no one among the leadership of the country seems to have a definitive handle on things.

There can be nothing more debilitating than a generalised and undefined sense of anxiety in the body politic. It breeds conspiracies and fear.

There is an impression that a very complex society has developed, in the last few years, a rather simple, centralised governance mechanism in the hope that delivery can be better and more quickly driven. The complexity of governance then gets located within a single structure of authority rather than in the devolved structures envisaged in the Constitution, which should interact with one another continuously, and in response to their specific settings, to achieve defined goals. Collapse in a single structure of authority, because there is no robust backup, can be catastrophic.

The autonomy of devolved structures presents itself as an impediment only when visionary cohesion collapses. Where such cohesion is strong, the impediment is only illusory, particularly when it encourages healthy competition, for example, among the provinces, or where a province develops a character that is not necessarily autonomous politically but rather distinctive and a special source of regional pride. Such competition brings vibrancy to the country. It does not necessarily challenge the centre.

Devolved autonomy is vital in the interests of sustainable governance. The failure of various structures to actualise their constitutionally defined roles should not be attributed to the failure of the prescribed governance mechanism. It is too early to say that what we have has not worked. The only viable corrective will be in our ability to be robust in identifying the problems and dealing with them concertedly.

We have never had social cohesion in South Africa — certainly not since the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. What we definitely have had over the decades is a mobilising vision. Could it be that the mobilising vision, mistaken for social cohesion, is cracking under the weight of the reality and extent of social reconstruction, and that the legitimate framework for debating these problems is collapsing? If that is so, are we witnessing a cumulative failure of leadership?

I am making a descriptive rather than an evaluative inquiry. I do not believe that there is any single entity to be blamed. It is simply that we may be a country in search of another line of approach. What will it be?

I would like to suggest two avenues of approach — an inclusive model and a counter-intuitive model of leadership.

In an inclusive approach, leadership is exercised not only by those who have been put in some position of power to steer an organisation or institution. Leadership is what all of us do when we express, sincerely, our deepest feelings and thoughts; when we do our work, whatever it is, with passion and integrity.

Counter-intuitive leadership lies in the ability of leaders to read a problematic situation, assess probable outcomes and then recognise that those outcomes will only compound the problem. Genuine leadership, in this sense, requires going against probability in seeking unexpected outcomes. That’s what happened when we avoided a civil war and ended up with an “unexpected” democracy.

Right now, we may very well hear desperate calls for unity, when the counter-intuitive imperative would be to acknowledge disunity. A declaration of unity where it manifestly does not appear to exist will fail to reassure.

Many within the “broad alliance” might have the view that the mobilising vision of old may have transformed into a strategy of executive steering with a disposition towards an expectation of compliance. No matter how compelling the reasons for that tendency, it may be seen as part of a cumulative process in which popular notions of democratic governance are apparently undermined and devalued; and where public uncertainty in the midst of seeming crisis induces fear which could freeze public thinking at a time when more voices ought to be heard.

Could it be that part of the problem is that we are unable to deal with the notion of opposition? We are horrified that any of us could be seen to have become “the opposition”. The word has been demonised. In reality, it is time we began to anticipate the arrival of a moment when there is no longer a single, overwhelmingly dominant political force as is currently the case. Such is the course of history. The measure of the maturity of the current political environment will be in how it can create conditions that anticipate that moment rather than seek to prevent it. We see here once more the essential creativity of the counter-intuitive imperative.

This is the formidable challenge of a popular post-apartheid political movement. Can it conceptually anticipate a future when it is no longer overwhelmingly in control, in the form in which it is currently, and resist, counter-intuitively, the temptation to prevent such an eventuality? Successfully resisting such an option would enable its current vision and its ultimate legacy to our country to manifest in different articulations, which then contend for social influence. In this way, the vision never really dies; it simply evolves into higher, more complex forms of itself. Consider the metaphor of flying ants replicating the ant community by establishing new ones.

We may certainly experience the meaning of comradeship differently, where we will now have “comrades on the other side”.

Any political movement that imagines itself as a perpetual entity should look at the compelling evidence of history. Few movements have survived those defining moments when they should have been more elastic, and that because they were not, did not live to see the next day.

I believe we may have reached a moment not fundamentally different from the sobering, yet uplifting and vision-making, nation-building realities that led to Kempton Park in the early ’90s. The difference between then and now is that the black majority is not facing white compatriots across the negotiating table. Rather, it is facing itself: perhaps really for the first time since 1994. Could we apply to ourselves the same degree of inventiveness and rigorous negotiation we displayed leading up to the adoption or our Constitution?

This is not a time for repeating old platitudes. It is the time, once more, for vision.

In the total scheme of things, the outcome could be as disastrous as it could be formative and uplifting, setting in place the conditions for a true renaissance that could be sustained for generations to come.

Ndebele is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and author of the novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela

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