Okay, I get it, this sounds like every community would be able to get by on a solar panel on every roof as long as it’s owned by the community.
Or maybe we mean that workers take over the grid and run it. Would be nice, but they would still need money and a lot of help.
Socially Owned Energy is neither of these things.
It’s more like the National Health System (NHS) in the UK, well how the NHS used to be before successive governments privatised bits of it – so that it’s no longer running as brilliantly as it used to as anything private is run for profit and not people.
Socially Owned Energy in South Africa would mean that Eskom, the power utility, is publicly owned by the state. This means that the current direction that the government and the Eskom bosses have been taking our energy system, towards corporatization and marketization, must be reversed.
We need to call for the full nationalisation of the power sector. We need to reclaim it under public ownership.
But we know that government-owned energy is not going to be any better than the government that owns it.
So this tells us that we are facing a crisis that can only be solved with governments that truly serve the people – in other words, the fight for Climate Justice is also the fight for a real democracy and public participation.
With a few exceptions our current band of leaders the world over are leading us on a death march….
