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Loadshedding. That word that drums up the same fear and loathing an imminent dentist visit does. You know it’s happening, but you can at least count the hours and days before you have to go through that pain. You can at least try and enjoy the time you have left before facing pure evil!
Ok. It’s an unfair equivalency to equate a dentist visit with load shedding. I get it…with dentist visits there is at least relief in sight.
I recently needed to try and quantify the effect that load shedding have on my business and ultimately my income. I first needed to identify the amount of billable hours I can realistically have per month and then see what the effect of single load shedding schedule will have on that. I was appalled to find that 20% of my billable hours will go the same way as the electricity supply…gone. That is 20% of my business and thus also roughly 20% of my personal spend. Money that could have been used to the benefit of my family and have been put in the hands of other business owners…keeping the gears of the economy turning.
Then there is the damage this system of loadshedding is causing to certain electrical equipment. I am a heavy user of computers, but I struggle to believe that it is due to my usage that I needed to replace my hard drive four times in as many years. That is the kind of damage that occurs when no proper shutdowns are performed on pc’s. And these parts are not replaced by Eskom or with my tax money…oh no…it is replaced with my declining loadshedded income.
Early warning systems? Well, if you want to call a loadshedding schedule on the internet an early warning system, go right ahead. Due to the hit-and-miss nature of loadshedding the schedules posted on the internet are at best interesting reading. And for people such as myself that would like to squeeze as much productivity out of one day as I possibly can before the power goes out I will invariably be struck with an outage at a time my hands are still firmly planted on my keyboard.
How difficult can it be for Eskom to approach mobile service providers to supply them with the infrastructure to notify the citizens of a particular area of an outage exactly ten minutes before it occurs? With something as simple and as cost effective as an sms? In a time where almost all adults around the country are affected by outages and have mobile phones such a system will not only be a matter of courtesy to your citizens, but it will at least provide the entire country with enough warning to make the necessary arrangements for an outage. And for those who wish to do the math...the ACTUAL cost of an sms is NOT 80c. It is MUCH less than that. MUCH, MUCH less. And for all the profits our mobile companies are making for them to subsidize such a system may equate to something as ridiculously inexpensive as R10000 per day to have 8 million people notified every single day.
What grates me particularly is that we may live at the foot end of a third world continent, but we never lived in a third world country. When the electricity goes out for reasons other than general maintenance I feel cheated. After all…it’s not as if I am demanding a supply of a commodity that I don’t want to pay for. It’s not as if I am in a position to send Eskom a bill for income I am losing due to them breaking a silent agreement between supplier and consumer. In any other industry, even my own, I could stand to lose thousands if a client decided that my negligence caused them to lose money unnecessarily.
Then you read about the exorbitant bonuses and salaries paid to Eskom executives and you hark back to a time your boss would have scoffed in your face if you were a detriment to his company and you dared to ask for a raise. Yet these people get away with it. Every year. For the last two decades.
There are, however, a few things we as consumers of natural resources should not lose sight of. This planet of ours has a finite amount of resources. Everyone has heard this before, but no-one has taken it to heart. We, especially in South Africa, are blessed with vast areas of nothingness where solar farms and wind turbines could have made a significant dent in the electricity supply of our country. Yet I do not see any significant plants of this nature anywhere. Why? The wind and the sun are the two resources you will NEVER run out of. It is resources that will outlive the human species as we know it. And even if you implemented a short term tax and used that money to erect such facilities I would dare to say that very few people in South Africa would have caused too much of a fuss about that short term tax.
But no. We remain reliant on digging holes in this earth to hunt for coal. And we also have to live with individuals in power that are old enough to believe that nuclear power is a thing from the devil just because that sort of power was once harnessed to flatten Japanese cities.
I am a citizen of my country. As with all democracies out there you have citizens like me that pay taxes. The taxes are collected and distributed to create infrastructure and to maintain existing infrastructure. All we can hope for is that the ones in charge of collecting and distributing our money make wise decisions to the benefit of all its citizens. I, unfortunately, do not have that feeling. Instead I feel as if the production and distribution of one of the most instrumental commodities for human advancement have been left to money hungry buffoons with zero ideas and willpower to make things right.
A message to my government:
I love my country. I love its people. I love the fact that we have so much more over here than most other people will ever experience in their little corner of this planet. I am dedicated to making this country the best it can be.
Stop treating me and millions of other citizens like we are in inconvenience. We do NOT live in a third world country and the time has come for you to eradicate third world thinking. Keeping your people in the dark while certain individuals enjoy the fruits of your citizens’ labour will see an eventual revolt the likes of which you probably cannot quantify. When that day comes anything you say or do will be a case of “too little too late”.
