My intention was actually to stay out of the dailyinvestor boot-loop thread but here it goes anyway,
part of the problem is that the news - in this case specifically “Ramokgopa deliberately misleading South Africans” - is “news” with the sole basis being 2 twitter posts.
Ramokgopa posted a video where he was talking during a corporate event on 24 July about moving from energy instability to energy security.
Yelland then interpreted Ramokgopa’s words, and responded to it → dailyoutrage scrambled the twitter posts around for their “article” on 3 August.
Ramokgopa did say Komati was the best performing power station when shutdown (likely factually inaccurate but Komati seems to also not to have been the worst performing relative to other coal stations).
Ramokgopa did indicate that not having Komati means 1000MW generation is not available (he did not claim it was producing 1000MW when shut down). The economic viability of resurrecting Komati will probably make it a non-starter.
Ramokgopa did NOT say, as claimed by dailyinvestor, that komati was shut down because of JET money (they leave out a very specific “and” in their quoting. What he did say was that because of JET and low carbon commitments this now means komati is going renewable and the option to restart the coal generation is removed (this is my interpretation of his words, not a quote)).
The other thing that is also lost in the twitterfication of information is context. Ramokgopa’s comments were when he was specifically commenting on international investor questioning about why South Africa seems reluctant to make the non-coal transition. He then made the comments in the context that totally removing potential 1000MW from coal based generation, having it replaced with 270MW renewable energy while also removing 3 jobs for every 1 Eskom employee from the supporting industry/commerce around Komati might not be the best resolution for the people in Komati simply because developed countries now want a low-carbon world. Ramokgopa also specifically indicated what he is saying is completely counter to the government position on a commitment to low carbon transition.
I doubt the economics will make sense today but the appeal to restart it from a job perspective is easy to see - when Komati was taken out of the cupboard again in the late 2000’s the return to service project apparently “was completed using 262 separate contracts, with a peak staffing of 3 237 people on site” and in terms of operation meant at the time “that 2370 people, which include 245 Eskom staff and 2125 contractors, now have jobs and are able to provide for their families”.
I agree with Yelland that singling out komati while not admitting to the many failures in local infrastructure etc. is selective. There is potentially a reason why Komati gets mentioned though. The easy take is simple vote buying. I think it is more than that - no one, including the many nations with “maintenance” as part of their vocabulary have an answer for what to do with the many unskilled/semi-skilled jobs that are currently filled in the (coal)mining industry. Apparently the region has a soaring unemployment rate of 38%, and more than 100,000 jobs depend on coal. So, singling out a town and region that face the prospect of many more job losses, is maybe also a way to try and reduce the likelihood of combustion, so to speak.
I read there are some “questions” about the Daily Investor, but still, where there is smoke … wait, there is not one reporting outlet that has not been “questioned”.
I’ve said in the past that a lot is communicated in the naming and sometimes even the font.
Take The daily friend, which is a publication of the IRR. The naming and font is somewhat reminiscent of the Daily caller, especially the older one, which is an extremely conservative American publication.
Now you have the Daily investor, which probably inadvertently trips over similar branding… but also… it is owned by Broad Media, who also owns MyBroadband and BusinessTech.
And as you know… I am not a fan of MyBB. They’re a tabloid as far as I am concerned.
My wife also picks up “nuances”, “reads between the lines” … and sometimes the actual “message” gets lost.
That all goes over my head BTW.
So, as I’ve seen, once one gets past the bumfluff, the “one-sided-opinion”, the hints, the “bad news sells”, whatever we want to call it, “branding” even, what is the core story, the one-liner that triggered the article?
Then we have 10 people reading the same one-liner, them with a host of other life experiences throw-in … we get a lot of different “takeaways”.
Now if one can “absorb” all that too … reduce it back to a core view … see the pattern … now that is cool.
EDIT: We do that every single day in our own lives, they call it gaining experience, and then we all add our own bits to the common collective knowledge.
So I say, don’t throw out the baby with the water … and the bath, shampoo … the soap sommer too … for a “font”.
Even Huisgenoot can have some interesting titibits.
Let me throw in an analogy. You may have heard this old chestnut: History is written by the victors!
Some people conclude from that that therefore we cannot know history at all.
But that is precisely what the study of history is about. It is about filtering the facts from the fluff.
The old Egyptian pharaohs didn’t like to write about their military losses. Does that mean they never lost a battle?
My main contention in this discussion is not that it is all false. My contention is that the true bits are sometimes made a bit too true, in the service of an agenda. Perhaps not an overt agenda, but every journalist (like every historian) runs the risk of inserting his own spin on things.
But the thing is… he shows his work. He has a knack for finding the horses mouth, and letting it speak.
Years ago, there was an American dude running a blog which he called “A slow news day”, which was literally just long lists of links to news stories that didn’t really make the headlines, often with research that had unpopular outcomes. Wish we had something like that in SA.
And a second thing, about “a new spin”. There is something called “latent racism”. And we all have it, whether we like it or not. And so often, especially in this debate, I think it plays a role. It is not deliberate, and we may think we’re all smarty-pants by ascribing it to “culture”, which I myself has done. And it is not wrong, but I definitely try to put a spin on things that goes away from anything that can even loosely be construed as “these people can’t do anything right!”. One way that I do that, is I turn it back on myself: my own culture must certainly, at times, get in the way of seeing things as they truly are.
Saw that on another forum, just posted, and saw your reply … and I thought I’m sorry … “spin”, wait, hold on, how do I try and apply what you are saying to that what is actually happening here in SA?
Why do we keep on talking “around” the problem? “They” broke Eskom … who are “they”?
“They”, “these people” encompasses every single person, every company director/employee, every Gov person, every politician, irrespective of the mother tongue they prefer, who dabbled their hands into the Eskom trough. Who stands in the way of fixing it. Allowing it to continue …
That vid … how the dinges does one even begin to fathom how to fix Eskom, SA, the whole shebang, if that is blatantly allowed to continue.
It is easy to link “culture” to ethnic groups … we have a criminal “culture” that is rife in SA and it spans ALL the ethnic groups. “They”, “these people” now have their own grouping … Criminal Culture.
And it groups the rest of us, using all 12 official mother tongues, into one group … WE, US…
Now that is putting lipstick on a pig for ya! As I have said many a time, look around… See the laws and policies. See the failings, look at the outcomes as effects of those policies. The past behaviour is an excellent predictor of future actions, we now had 30 years about, of that here. Then look north, no grabbing at straws, where is it going any better regarding policies and prosperity, not at the few but that of the many. Building up vs burning down and destroying. When was the last time you saw your family or friends or colleagues burn down a school, or intimidate working people? I will leave it at that. The bell curve is real…
That’s another topic where I end up being unpopular. The “white genocide” debate. No, by the formal definition of the word, that is not what is going on. There is no targeted process. What there is, which is equally criminal, is an unwillingness to do something about it, or to be seen doing something about it at the very least.
Much like the covid debate this will be my one and only message on this topic as well.
Honestly the white genocide crowd irk me way more than I guess they should, to me I see them doing far more harm than good, they are taking a legit problem (rural safety) and turning it into a race issue and in the process taking away the focus from where it needs to be.
Obviously on the other side of that coin we have a prominent guy wearing a red beret singing some not so good songs… further putting fuel on the fire and feeding the genocide narrative.
We can only really hope cooler heads will prevail because I see neither extreme as beneficial to the long term goal of a sustainable SA.
In Europe and the USA … Israel and France recently … Cpt right now … it is a frustrating thing, disillusionment with a strong Criminal Element added … whatever it is, it is not an ethnic culture “thing”.
What debate … I never touched on that, not even alluded to that. … I said Criminal Culture.
See, now we derail terribly again … Covid comes up, race issue … (sorry PJJ)
I will type this slowly … Criminal Culture … has no preferred mother tongue.
Not to prolong things, and I would really also rather not go down this rabbit hole… but yes. That’s often where such debates end. Someone will yell at me (in as much as one can do that online): If your family was murdered, you would feel the same!
Yes, I probably would. But at that point I wouldn’t be doing it with a cool head, and I may well be as wrong as the next guy who thinks of this on an emotional level only.
For all these things, my point has always been: Don’t overstate your case. It isn’t even necessary. It is bad enough without doing that!
