I’ve been waiting, trying not to write about the electricity crisis that South Africans are currently living through. According to government and its electricity monopoly we will be living with an uncertain power supply situation for longer than is acceptable and there is nothing anyone can do about it right now.
Government preaches about the Batho Pele principles; Batho Pele says that government will strive to create a better life for all South Africans by putting people first.
Clearly the people were not placed first which is why we find ourselves in this mess. Yes it is a mess. It’s a mess in the biggest possible way. We as the citizenry need to be able to trust that our public structures and institutions will always do what’s in our best interest, even if it means giving us bad news before the crisis hits so that we can make plans to deal with it.
For some inexplicable reason between 1998 and 2008 government and Eskom decided to hide the fact that we were headed for this crisis. In March 2006 the President responded to a parliamentary question by saying “The Honourable Member is proceeding from the wrong assumption that our government has failed to meet South Africa‘s electricity capacity needs.”
Less than two years later we are experiencing on an almost daily basis just how wrong or ill informed the President was.
I have every confidence that South Africa will pull out of this crisis quickly. ESKOM – despite this embarrassment and its spineless executives – is a world class electricity company, government now has the urgency to deliver and the money is available. We will survive and I’m sure the South African economy will prosper once again.
However in the face of short term economic woes we are jokingly being advised by the Minister of Minerals and Energy to “Go to sleep earlier so that you can grow and be cleverer”. Clearly the Minister – Energy issues is part of her portfolio – and her colleagues were going to sleep too early and this is how we have landed in this mess. The country faces the real prospect of an economic slow down which could result in large scale job losses.
What is unfortunate about this whole mess is that this crisis has given more cannon fodder for racists fools try to back up their arguments. The internet is littered with racist drivel about how this crisis proves that black people cannot govern a country or run large corporations. Grant Walliser counters this nicely “White people need to understand that black executives at Eskom warned the government about the impending power crisis. One of the key people who didn’t listen was white. Why is this still a racial issue?”
This is not a race issue this is an ineptitude issue. Heads should roll; there is no collective responsibility on this one. We should be looking at solutions and cleaning house at the same time. Obviously we cannot trust the same people who got us into this mess in the first place to get us out of this mess.
What’s that joke again? Oh yes “will someone please turn the light off at the end of the tunnel”.