PATRICK BOND AND DESMOND D’SA: Thorny questions for Just Energy Transition Partnership negotiators

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No-one should oppose the project if questions about odious debt, World Bank involvement, methane gas and energy racism are answered

In SA the worlds of high finance and climate justice are colliding, with unfortunate results expected to manifest at the UN’s COP27 climate summit taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, next month.

Specifically, two fragile coal-fired power stations — Medupi and Kusile — cost not the original R163bn estimate but closer to R450bn. Then Eskom chair Valli Moosa awarded the main boiler procurement contracts to Hitachi in 2007, just after the Tokyo firm had gifted 25% of Hitachi Power Africa to the governing party’s funding arm, Chancellor House.

Last month former US vice-president and environmentalist Al Gore called for the World Bank’s president, David Malpass, to be fired due to his “ridiculous” climate change denialism, and the problem is evident when other staff push methane gas projects or demand Medupi debt repayment. Will JETP partners permit Eskom’s meth addiction because they believe — as does the EU’s “sustainable finance taxonomy” — that gas can be considered “green”?

Will the JETP come in the form of loans, instead of grants that would be far more appropriate given SA’s existing $174bn foreign debt? And will such JETP loans be denominated in dollars, pounds or euros? If so, with the rand having crashed from R14 to R18 to the dollar in recent months, what effective real interest rate should be assumed for repayment into a future with further depreciation?

Speaking of hypocrisy, is Pretoria’s not glaring in deploying 1,200 SA National Defence Force troops in northern Mozambique to defend Paris-based Total, Houston-based ExxonMobil and other multinationals drilling to tap into 125-trillion cubic feet of gas, in a war zone that has left 1-million people displaced and thousands dead, just as climate-fuelled cyclones on the coast become more intense?

 

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