SA is obviously a deeply divided country. It is also, bewilderingly, a country which splits itself between what can be termed its large Guatemala section and the small enclave demarcated as Switzerland.

In Guatemala, rated one of the more lawless and violent countries in Latin America, it’s the rule of the gangs and the corrupt which drives high levels of violent crime such as murder, armed robbery and narcotics trafficking.

Many of these features pervade most of SA today — with spiking crime rates, almost weekly drive-by shootings and everyday stories of corrupt practices in the public and private sectors. Many of Eskom’s woes flow from the illegal connections of electricity to hundreds of thousands of households, where the residents receive free electricity courtesy of the illegal connections while the small Swiss part of SA picks up the ever-rising tab.

In the Swiss part of SA, it’s heavy on legal compliance and regulation, rigid rule making and box-ticking. Just try to run any enterprise here and the regulators at CIPC (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission) will be over you like the proverbial rash.

Recently I was involved in vacating a directorship for a non-profit NGO and tendered a copy of my ID document dutifully, attested a true version of the original by a commissioner of oaths. However, two of my fellow directors did not send a copy of both sides of their ID cards. The CIPC immediately rejected all three, and the entire process had to be recommenced afresh. The certified copy of my correctly tendered ID document was now one month out of date, so misery all round.

Just try to execute a minor corporate action, say the sale or acquisition of some shares in a company and the declaration of dividends to cover it. Both in terms of the Companies Act and SA Revenue Service legislation, each step must be performed in a specific, dated order and each requires careful resolution, notification and documentation.

And try to import even a small amount of foreign currency here. Unless you are the president of SA, for example, whose hundreds of thousand of US dollars in his farm sofa apparently went unreported, a thicket of forms from your local bank need to be completed and each transfer minutely justified.

And if, as expected, SA gets greylisted soon in terms of international body the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the levels of compliance and monitoring will go into the stratosphere and the army of regulators and form fillers will multiply, not good for real productivity but excellent for mushrooming of the dead hand of bureaucracy, public and private. All drive up the costs of business and increase the myriad rules and regulations to which the Swiss part of SA must comply.

This is likely to happen not because we don’t have the rule book (volumes of them in place) nor because of a shortage of regulators. Rather it’s a matter of enforcement or lack thereof. According to the FATF authorities report of October 2021, “SA has emerged as a hub for money laundering and the financing of terrorist activities due to rampant corruption and inabilities in the criminal justice system”.

In part answer to this, parliament is steamrollering two new bills to mind the gap. But that will simply and literally paper over the cracks in the system and will not move the needle one jot in terms of fixing a broken system and tamping down on corruption.

However, in SA right now there is a shared misery which links both its Guatemala parts to its Swiss section: up to 12 hours per day when no part of SA received electricity. It is perfectly true that in Switzerland SA the effect can be met at great cost: generators, inverters and going off the grid. But even here, except for the multimillionaire class, it’s not sustainable. Just consider the costs revealed this week by our largest retailer, Shoprite.

According to an operational update it published yesterday, over the past months as load-shedding ramped up, the group spent R560m on diesel to keep its operations going and lit. That amounts to R3.1m every day for just six months. And the cost simply gets passed on to the consumer.

It is precisely because of this shared misery that the ANC fears the impact of its homegrown and entirely self-made electricity disaster on its polling prospects next year.

It is perfectly true that despite cancelled overseas visits and giving the crisis his “full attention” (whatever that might mean), the president has not for an entire month taken the people of SA into his confidence. He does not address the nation; he refuses to hold press conferences, and he declines to summons parliament to tell them of his plans and allow for their interrogation.

But for the ruling party elite, it’s a different matter. Despite the national calamity, there is plenty of presidential face time for the comrades at National Executive and National Working Committee meetings and party lekgotlas et al.

The latest such conflab, which ended on Monday, saw Cyril Ramaphosa announce that “work is under way in government to ascertain whether the requirements for a declaration of a state of disaster could be met” to deal with the electricity crisis.

That, after an intensive month of meetings and planning, is very vaguely worded but suggests that coming your way soon is another state of disaster, just as the nation “enjoyed” during the Covid crisis.

And you know who (actually grim-faced Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma) will then take charge of it. That is something to look forward to. She is using the taxpayer shilling to fend off a stiff court challenge requiring her to provide business body Sakeliga with all records relating to her decisions and the regulations she foisted on the country during the Covid pandemic.

Sakeliga — reasonably — wants to know precisely what her basis was, for example, for banning the sale of slip slops, cooked chickens, books and the total ban on cigarette sales (except for the fact that Guatemala had a field day in providing the illegal sort). Madame Zuma does not do transparency and is high though on irrationality and prejudice. Imagine how much fun she will have banning electric kettles, regulating cooking hours and thermostats.

Then there are the “hyenas feeding”, to borrow Ramaphosa’s phrase, no less when he decried the “pack of hyenas who circle a wounded prey” when lamenting the Sars revelation that no less than 60% of emergency procurements by the state during Covid went to businesses that were politically connected to the ANC and its personalities.

Imagine the feeding frenzy when the tender regulations are loosened to meet the needs of electricity and its generation.

In fact no imagination is required: News24 provided this week the grim detail of how the ANC funding arm, Chancellor House, received R1.2m gratis from Hitachi as “a tender support fee” for its award of a R38bn contract to build the boilers for both the Kusile and Medupi power stations. Actually, if properly built and on time and on budget, there would be no load-shedding today. Except they weren’t, and the ruinous cost and time overruns were attributed in the main to the jerry-built and poorly designed boilers.

So plenty of prospects for further shortcuts and short-term enrichment, unless full transparency, total accountability and the monitoring of all regulations by actual energy experts accompanies the latest proposal from the president.

Otherwise soon enough there won’t be an enclave left here that is more Swiss than Guatemala — it will just be darkness visible and every person for themselves and the last ones standing could turn off the lights, except that won’t by then be necessary. Or possible.

Tony Leon, a former leader of the opposition, now chairs Resolve Communications. @TonyLeonSA