To implement the state’s ‘decarbonization’-plus-gasification strategy, Eskom lobbied for a $8.5 billion ‘Just Energy Transition Partnership’ commitment – for low-interest loans from the U.S., UK and European governments – at the Glasgow United Nations COP26 climate summit in 2021. Hence in 2019 the state’s transport parastatal Transnet promoted a World Bank Liquefied Natural Gas plant. But the activists’ demand is directed to a government that would rather borrow new money to continue fossil-based energy supply to its allied multinational corporations. To repudiate Eskom’s Odious Debt would dramatically reduce repayment pressure on the utility’s $22 billion debt. Eskom is also in the process of privatizing, and as a result, its leadership aims to end cross-subsidization that assists low-income users. The utility has been crippled by dysfunctional coal-fired power plants that represent 85% of its power generation, resulting in early-October ‘Stage 6 load-shedding’ cutting electricity to most households and businesses for up to six hours a day.Īnd in order to pay for Medupi and two other plants, Eskom has raised the real price of electricity by more than 620% since 2007. One demand is that the Eskom debt related to Hitachi’s central role in Medupi and another coal-fired power plant, Kusile, be repudiated, in part to prevent a 32% increase in Eskom’s electricity price next year.
In addition, the Bank lent more than $3 billion in 2010 for what was the world’s largest coal-fired power plant under construction, a project rife with corruption – especially bribery of the ruling party by Tokyo-based Hitachi – already well known at the time, and successfully prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States in 2015.
The financing included not only apartheid-era loans that exacerbated parastatal energy supplier Eskom’s official racist policies from 1951-67 and neoliberal policy advice during the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994. Throughout its 71-year history in South Africa, the World Bank financed episodes of high-carbon, anti-social mega-project maldevelopment.
The main call was for repudiation of a massive loan – the Bank’s largest-ever project credit – made a dozen years earlier but still causing enormous financial and climate damage: the Medupi coal-fired power plant. Nearly 100 protesters from community, environment and youth groups joined Extinction Rebellion and the campaign outside the World Bank’s Johannesburg office on Friday, October 14, the second such event in the last eight months. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings have witnessed protests in Washington and many other sites.
0 kommentar(er)
