FROM THE BARREL

US President Donald Trump, affectionately known as ‘the Donald’, has boldly and unapologetically made the drilling of more oil and gas wells his main policy in the quest for the return of his country’s premier status as the world’s leading oil producer.

It is not difficult to see why. Under ‘the Donald’ as Potus 45, the United States became the world’s number one oil producer, even surpassing Saudi Arabia. Hoping to repeat this feat, he is informed that he could increase and accordingly refill both the crude oil and gasoline inventories, thereby enhancing his administration’s energy security on the one hand and strengthening his inflation-bargaining leverage on the other.

So much of his musings on the topic, according to the Oil & Gas Watch, are recommendations contained in Project 2025, a seminal report of the Heritage Foundation. Such recommendations may or may not be accurate, argues the Oil & Gas Watch. No matter. Seldom are such recommendations intended to be, or for that matter, constrained by the bridles of accuracy, especially of the subjective variety.

The President, in his infinite wisdom, condensed all his hydrocarbon ambitions into Michael Steele’s 2008 refrain as Chairman of the Republican National Convention, short and sweet, ‘drill baby, drill’!

Trump is the dreaded Peterbald cat that has breached the sanctum of the climate change echo chamber. Every so often the lobbyists who dwell in these deep caverns are fed millions of unaccounted for dollars to bark and terrorise the consciousness of the scientifically undiscerning.

But the 47th Potus did not approbate or reprobate on the merits of their hypotheses about a cantankerous climate constantly inclined to change. With a lot of conviction, he just shut the money spigot of the USAID, and to our collective disbelief, the megaphones of zealotry suddenly gone deafeningly silent.

BP and Shell, two of the original Seven Sisters, had constructed and operated South Africa’s largest crude oil refinery since 1963 with a 180 000 bpd nameplate. Against the backdrop of a demurring project Europe, insistent that corporations and financial institutions accountable to its maze of bureaucracy should not fund, invest, or, for that matter, derive direct financial benefits from extracting and refining hydrocarbons, the consortium of the hapless siblings sold its aging and non-compliant facility to the Central Energy Fund for One Rand!

Drill baby drill, by the sheer force of its presence, has exerted an enormous strain on the guardrails of this Schopenhauer nihilism. And so in a quick turnaround, BP has announced its intention to resume investments in hydrocarbons, a move that undoubtedly will trigger and release the long-repressed sentiment held by many vehicular manufacturers and upstream energy generators, rendered incapable of dissent by the power of the USAID-funded green lobby universe.

In all of these developments, South Africa is uniquely challenged. In the 26th Conference of the Parties in Glasgow in the fall of 2021, the country’s delegation pulled out all the proverbial stops. They were egregiously ecstatic, announcing as they did how they flimflammed the global north into forking out eight billion US dollars for what was fantastically coined the ‘energy transition’. And the glee with which they attributed the largesse to esoteric causes was infectious too.

Spent or not, the transition has not occurred, not yet at least. And the former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, Daniel Mminele, specially handpicked by the President to overseer the program, hastily upped and departed in a huff without any cogent explanation, having been less than six months in the citadel of power. Interestingly, however, what were the terms against which the money was provided?

They were never revealed in public statements, not even carelessly. Neither were the representatives of the people assembled in Parliament ever taken into confidence of its tees and cees nor about the severity of the political strings that constricted it. To this day, the enduring conspiracy of silence has rendered Biden’s wry gift to an unsuspecting rainbow nation disturbingly mysterious.

It could have been a donation or a gratuitous gift. But more terrifyingly, it could have been a loan. If it was, God forbid, it was a reckless act of seditious betrayal. For a country borrowing R2 billion every day to service the interest on its consolidated national debt, currently hovering at an all-time high of 75.1% of nominal GDP, that was politically irresponsible. Hope it was not.

In the meantime, the honchos at Treasury should be fixing their books clean and good. Any act of procrastination will be costly. Elon Musk and the seemingly omniscient DOGE will come calling for an expansive audit or for sovereign blood, whichever is easier. And Afriforum and Solidarity will gleefully serve them for brutal slaughter.

Sarah Palin may well be a spent and irrelevant political force in the era of the Make America Great Again universe. In her own importunate inelegance, however, she managed to broadly popularise the currency of the ‘drill baby, drill’ battle cry, innocuously borrowed from the roughnecks of the oil rigs.

How deep and how far the drilling will go will be predicated on a number of vicissitudes that may coalesce to subvert the President’s dedicated project and so render its mantra illusory. If the will of the Donald is indomitable, however, whatever the extent of the drilling achievements are, the mantra will nevertheless forever define the post-Covid-19 pandemic era and its posterity.

There is a resilient section of the global north that may continue to proselytize on the climate doomsday prognostications to varying frequencies and intensities. But then again, having being friends of the USAID, they have been at it long enough to know the political adage that it is dangerous to be America’s enemy. But to be its friend is fatal.

** Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law. The views expressed do not reflect those of Sunday Independent, Independent Media or IOL.