In sofa as I can recall: troubles for Cyril Ramaphosa

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do. And so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. Today from London, I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Hydrogen is an odorless, colorless gas, but the phrases "blue hydrogen" and "green hydrogen" are regularly thrown around in energy transition conversations. We look into Britain's plans and investigate which color will make the most difference. And no one loved an eclipse more than Jay Pasachoff. The American astronomer had seen and studied more than almost anyone in the world. Our obituaries editor reflects on his lifelong mission to educate himself and the public about their wonders. First up, though, the leadership of South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa is under threat thanks to a pile of cash in a couch that's no longer there. On Wednesday, an independent panel concluded its investigations saying there are grounds for Parliament to impeach him.

The House will consider the report, its findings and recommendations, and adopt a resolution through a simple majority vote whether a further action by the House is necessary or not.

Today, senior officials in the African National Congress, or ANC, the party that's run South Africa since 1994, are discussing their leader's fate. Mr. Ramaphosa denies wrongdoing, but the whole affair will in any case undercut the very narrative of his presidency. He ran for leader of the ANC, promising to root out the endemic corruption in the party that had flourished under the previous president, Jacob Zuma. And the country had expected him to keep his position and his promises, perhaps for the rest of the decade. That is now in question.

Cyril Ramaphosa is in deep trouble following a bombshell report into an only-in-South-Africa scandal involving a score of buffalo, a Sudanese businessman, and hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from inside a sofa.

John McDermott is our chief Africa correspondent.

Now, this may sound like a bizarre caper, but it is in fact deeply serious, both for the president but also for the ruling party, the African National Congress, and most importantly, the country as a whole.

Okay, so let's start with the unlikely combination of, of actors here— the, the buffalo, the Sudanese businessmen, and the, and the, and the cash. What's the story?

Well, there's another character you need to introduce as well. That's Arthur Fraser, a former spy who 6 months ago went to the police with a story that resulted in a collective "huh" from the country. That story involved claims that the president had broken various laws concerning the concealment and then subsequent theft of large amounts of US dollars at Mr. Ramaphosa's game farm. Now, Mr. Fraser is something of an interesting messenger. He's widely seen as an ally of the former president, an enemy of Mr. Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma. So when people learned of the messenger, they were somewhat skeptical of the message. At the time, Ramaphosa said there was no criminal misconduct and that the money was stolen, but it was from proceeds of game sales. Now, that did not end the matter because the president's statement raised more questions than gave answers. And in Parliament, opposition MPs took advantage of a recent rule change in how they go about removing a president from office in order to get the Speaker of Parliament to appoint a panel of retired judges to look at the matter.

Okay, so what does the panel say about all this?

It said there was enough evidence to suggest that the president had broken various laws and violated the constitution by running a game farm while also being president, by not reporting the theft of the money through proper channels, by using his role as president to influence his Namibian counterpart in looking after some of the alleged thieves who had absconded to Namibia. And finally, the report threw doubt upon both the source of the money in the sofa and also how much there actually was in the first place.

And what does Mr. Ramaphosa himself say about all this?

Well, he still says he hasn't done anything wrong. His version of the story is that the cash taken from the sofa he reckons it was about $580,000, came from the sale of 20 buffaloes to a Sudanese businessman, and that this sale took place on Christmas Day in 2019. Now, one may ask, why was the money in the sofa in the first place? To which the president says it was a better option than putting it in the safe at the game farm, because other staff members might have had access to the safe. So his lodge manager stuck it in the sofa, and upon learning of the theft a few weeks later, Mr. Ramaphosa reported the matter to his personal protection team, which he says is a branch of the South African Police. So therefore, the idea that he didn't follow proper channels is incorrect because he did report it to a member of the police, albeit not the right police department. And he says that while yes, he owns a game farm because he's a rich guy, he's a former tycoon, he doesn't have any role in the day-to-day operations, and therefore he's not in breach of the constitutional ban on quote-unquote paid work.

Okay, so to put it lightly, it's an unusual case. What happens with it now?

Yes, it's an unusual case. It's also a very South African case in that it mixes elements of caper with elements of conspiracy and has huge potential consequences. So what happens now? Formally, the panel's report goes to MPs who then decide whether or not to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr. Ramaphosa. And if they do that, they will hold hearings, they will do their own report. And if it goes to a vote, and two-thirds of MPs decide to remove him from office, he's done. Now, that's the formal route. But there are a couple of other things going on. The first is within the ruling party, the ANC. It is meeting today to discuss the matter. And with awful timing for the president, it actually has its big quinquennial meeting in 2 weeks' time, where until very recently, Mr. Ramaphosa was expected to get reelected as president of the party and thus be the shoo-in to be the candidate for the ANC at the elections expected in 2024. The other thing that could happen is that before Parliament or the ANC decides his fate, the president decides his own fate. And yesterday there were reports that he was strongly considering resigning and he would make a televised statement to the nation. That didn't happen, but much of the country remains on tenterhooks.

And you hinted at the political implications of all of this as well. What are they?

The implications are potentially huge, and South Africans could be forgiven for having some cognitive dissonance here because on the one hand, polls show that South Africans are increasingly fed up with the ANC. They've had nearly 3 decades of corruption, economic mismanagement, rising crime, more blackouts, and so on. They're frustrated and annoyed with the ruling party. In all likelihood, even if Mr. Ramaphosa were to stay in office, the ANC will lose its national majority in 2024. So on one hand, the idea that the ANC could be further hurt by this scandal may not bring too many tears from a lot of South Africans. But on the other hand, things can always get worse in South Africa. And for all his flaws, and for all that he has disappointed in the wake of replacing Mr. Zuma, Cyril Ramaphosa is a known commodity to many South Africans. He is seen as, strangely or not in light of recent events, a safe pair of hands. And he's also seen as somebody that has prevented some really bad apples from retaking control of the ANC. So whilst many South Africans were and are looking forward to the next election when they may get a chance to loosen the ANC's grip on power, they're really worried about what might happen in the next months or years before they get that chance.

But it's worth asking, no matter how all of this actually plays out, given the scandal around all of this, where does this leave South Africa given the agenda that Mr. Ramaphosa had, the hopes that people put in him as the man to clean up the party and to lead the country into a different and better future?

It leaves the country in a mess. When he became president in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa promised a new dawn after the darkness of the Zuma years. He's largely failed to bring that about, but at least in certain areas he was trying. And one area that he had had some progress in was in tackling corruption. So it would be the ultimate sad irony if the president who came in promising to reassert the rule of law was ultimately kicked out for breaking it.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

We hope you enjoy listening to The Intelligence as much as we enjoy making it. We're always thinking of ways to improve, and to do that, we'd like to know more about you. Do us a little favor and fill out a short questionnaire at economist.com/intelligencesurvey. The link is in the show notes.

Thanks.

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do, and so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.

There is a lot of energy stored in the bonds between carbon atoms. That's why the whole world came to run on hydrocarbons. Now that burning them is unmistakably tied to climate change, governments are scrambling to decarbonize their energy systems. Some, such as Britain, are looking at another kind of bond between hydrogen atoms. Not as energy-rich, but burning hydrogen just creates water. That isn't without its complications, of course. Storing the stuff is more dangerous. But the real questions are how to make the most hydrogen without releasing much carbon, and how to scale it all up for a world that was built for different fuels.

So hydrogen has a lot of potential to decarbonize activities that can't be electrified very easily. So that's a whole range of things. Big one is industrial processes that require high temperatures. So steelmaking is a big one. And also transport, things like shipping, where electric vehicles just can't really handle it.

Shaquille Hashim wrote about the post-carbon economy for The Economist.

Because of this, increasingly countries are looking to hydrogen as a possible solution to climate change, including Britain.

And so what's Britain doing in this regard then?

So last year, Britain became the 12th country to release a hydrogen strategy that initially called for 5 gigawatts of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030. So that's enough for around 2% of current energy demand. And then in April, given the war in Ukraine, the government doubled that goal as part of its energy security strategy. So it's now betting that the UK can build a thriving hydrogen economy with 10 gigawatts of production by 2030. And they're spending a tonne of money to try and achieve that. So there's £240 million, which is just shy of $300 million. In a net-zero hydrogen fund, which is there to fund production projects and get them off the ground. And there's also going to be a price support mechanism called the Hydrogen Business Model, which will help subsidise the costs.

So how is Britain going to spend that big pile of money?

So a lot of that money is going to go to two geographical clusters. So one is called Hynet, that's in the northwest of England, and the other is the East Coast Cluster, which is around the Humber and Teesside in the north. East. So those regions not only have big industrial bases, but they also make use of lots of hydrogen already because hydrogen is used to produce methanol and ammonia fertilizer, and much of that is made up there, up north. And so in those regions, low-carbon hydrogen has a lot of potential because the hydrogen that's currently used in those processes is dirty. It's called grey hydrogen. Which is made from natural gas and releases a tonne of CO2. So the idea is that we can build up low-carbon hydrogen production near where hydrogen is already being used and swap it out like for like.

But what do you mean when you say low-carbon hydrogen though?

So there are two ways of making it, which is why it's such a nebulous term. So one is blue hydrogen, which is not actually blue. Not actually blue. All of this hydrogen is transparent. Blue hydrogen is made the same way as grey hydrogen, so from natural gas, but it uses carbon capture and storage to grab those emissions and pump them under the ground where the CO2 can be sequestered. So it's much less polluting than grey hydrogen. The other way is called green hydrogen, and that is created through electricity. So it uses an electrolyser to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And if that electrolyser is powered by renewable energy, like solar or wind or nuclear, it can produce zero-carbon hydrogen, effectively.

And so in Britain's plan, what colour of hydrogen are we aiming for?

So Britain is quite unusual in that it's pursuing a dual-track approach. So most countries are going all in on green hydrogen and they're leaving blue to the side. Britain is trying to build up both blue and green hydrogen infrastructure. So the flagship projects at those clusters I mentioned earlier, those are both blue hydrogen plants, so they rely on natural gas. That sparked quite a lot of criticism from green hydrogen champions who say that the blue hydrogen projects aren't actually environmentally friendly. They reduce our energy security because they rely on natural gas. We import about half of our natural gas. And if green hydrogen comes down in price over the next 10, 15 years, then we might have spent all this money building blue hydrogen projects that we don't need.

So why is Britain going about it in that dual-track way?

So blue hydrogen supporters in the government say, quite correctly, I think, that theirs is, for now, the only technology that can rapidly produce clean hydrogen at scale. Because there just isn't enough renewable electricity to make enough of the green variety. To meet all the government hydrogen targets from just green hydrogen would require about 126 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity a year. But in 2020, Britain produced just 135 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity in total. So the gap is absolutely massive.

We'd have to basically double our renewable electricity supply And you said that in addition to the pot of money, there was some sort of price support mechanism going on here.

Yes. So the government call it their hydrogen business model. Basically, it's there to subsidize the price because producing low-carbon hydrogen is more expensive than producing grey hydrogen. But with a bit of government help, you can help bring that price down. And it's designed in such a way so that as the price of clean hydrogen comes down over time, because the technology gets better, we get better at making it. The government support automatically gets withdrawn.

Right. But all of that is dependent on people using it, the demand for it.

Yes, it is. So there is a lot of industrial demand for hydrogen already with things like methanol and fertilizer, but there does need to be more. So the government is pursuing a few different ways of stimulating demand. So one is blending hydrogen into the gas network. So the pipes in your home, instead of being pure natural gas, would be a 20% hydrogen, 80% gas mix. Now that isn't quite as green as it might sound because hydrogen contains much less energy per litre than natural gas does. So blending 20% hydrogen into the natural gas actually only leads to a 7% reduction in emissions. But by creating a lot of demand very quickly, it could stimulate a lot of production. But there are other ideas the government is pursuing which don't make any sense. So they're thinking about using pure hydrogen for heat, so 100% hydrogen. One energy analyst I spoke to called that stupid. He didn't mince words. That's because hydrogen is so dangerous that to use pure hydrogen in your home would require you to replace every pipe, every valve, every appliance. And that would obviously cost a fortune and is a huge infrastructure effort. And it would still be less efficient than just using an electric heat pump. And a similar argument applies to another area which some people tout as being a good use of hydrogen, which is for buses and vans. Again, we're better off electrifying those rather than using hydrogen fuel cells.

So if those are not the most sensible ways to use hydrogen, what are the good ones?

So one that is particularly interesting is using hydrogen as an energy storage medium. So almost like a battery to help overcome the peaks and troughs of our future all-renewable grid. Because when renewable energy is plentiful, so on days when it's really sunny and really windy, we could turn on electrolyzers and produce hydrogen, which we then store under the ground. And then when the renewable energy is scarce, that same hydrogen could be burned in a power station or used in fuel cells to generate electricity. So that could help make the all-renewable grid work. And it's a really promising application because at the moment, battery technology isn't quite there to store huge amounts of electricity for a very long amount of time, whereas hydrogen seems like a natural fit. So in that sense, hydrogen could be a really crucial part of our future or renewable grid.

Shaquille, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

Ever since humanity's beginnings, human beings have been very frightened of eclipses. The sun going suddenly dark, the birds falling silent and then roosting. But J. Pasachoff took an entirely different view.

Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.

To him, the perfect alignment in solemn darkness of the two celestial bodies that mean most to us, and he felt he had to see as many as possible. Of course, he had all sorts of cameras and computers to record the event because he was the professor of astronomy at Williams College, but he still felt he had to commune directly with the sun and moon as the moon crept over the face of the sun, and he would always steal a few seconds at least for himself to look up and marvel at it. He considered that as a professor of astronomy, it was his job to observe as many eclipses as he could. He ended up seeing 75, which made him the second-ranking person in the world for sightings. Every 18 months or so, which is the usual time lapse between total eclipses, he would go off somewhere around the globe lugging about 2,000 pounds of stuff, of recording equipment, computers, and everything else. And for him, a large part of this interest was because once the sun's disk was completely obscured by the moon, It was much easier to see the corona of the Sun, that is its outer atmosphere, and that was his particular interest. The corona was the part that became most lively when there were sunspots on the disc of the Sun, so the great streamers would come out of the corona. And he also liked to observe the plumes that gathered in the polar regions of the Sun. And the loops of ionized gas that looped out of the corona and back again. The corona was a particularly interesting field of study because although it was only a millionth as bright as the Sun's surface, it was 300 times hotter, and nobody quite understood why. So one of J. Pasachoff's particular pursuits was to work out whether this extra heat was caused by nanoflares, tiny, tiny flares constantly erupting from the Sun, or whether maybe it was caused by vibrations and oscillations from those loops of ionized gas. He was absolutely hooked on looking at the Sun, and this had started quite early in boyhood when he had become part of the Amateur Astronomical Association, a member of that. And he used to visit the Hayden Planetarium in the Natural History Museum in New York City where he was brought up. He would love to spend hours there. And over the entrance, there's a triptych of paintings of 3 famous eclipses that occurred over the United States in 1918, 1923, and 1925. And these intrigued him. He also became a member of the Amateur Astronomy Association and started to build a telescope, even grinding and polishing the mirror himself. And he showed such aptitude that it was fairly easy for him to get into Harvard when he was only What really turned him on to astronomy was that he was taken up to view an eclipse by the professor of astronomy at Harvard, taken up in a DC-3 aircraft above the rain clouds. And he never, never forgot. It was an annular eclipse. There was a fine line of light around the dark disk of the sun. And that was all he needed to make it his career for life. He always wanted to enthuse everyone, just as he had been enthused. And around the campus at Williams, he would often buttonhole people if they hadn't heard about the next eclipse and give them a 20-minute lecture on why they should care about it and how it was going to occur. The best sort of publicity he could have though for eclipses was obviously when a good one appeared over America. There was an extremely good one, a total eclipse in 2017. It was called the Great American Eclipse, and it went from Oregon to South Carolina. He did all he could to promote the watching of this, and in fact he succeeded because it was reckoned that 88% of the adult population of the USA actually watched this eclipse, either electronically or in person. And that was about twice as many as had watched the Super Bowl. So he had made his point. He especially liked to think of all the schoolchildren looking up at that great eclipse. And he liked to think that among them would be quite a few who would take up science as a result, and like his own students, would eventually go on to head astronomy departments in colleges and universities. So the next great eclipse across America, which was going to go from Mexico to the Canadian Maritimes, even better than the 2017 one, was coming up in 2024. Sadly, he didn't live to see that one, but he had already reserved his place for the best spot.

Anne Rowe on Jay Pasachoff, who's died aged 79. Kamie Painter, and assistant producer Barkley Bram. We'll all see you back here on Monday.