At the time of writing this article, there is loadshedding; the power is off intermittently for two to four hours at all locations in South Africa. This is a regular occurrence, and it represents a complete failure to provide an adequate power supply.
Throughout the country, situations will occur whereby power is needed, and lack of supply will in some circumstances cause danger and threat to life. There are places where a power supply is needed for emergency power, emergency lighting, emergency pumping, and so on. For some part of a day, every day throughout the country, these are not provided. For any government, this is a hopeless failure.
We should at least record this event so that we can ensure it never happens again in the future, assuming that, at some stage, this situation returns to normal. We can say with conviction and authority that the problem we have with the power supply is entirely a result of poor administration by government. There is no national government I know of which has so completely failed to provide an adequate power supply for the country it administers. Anybody reading this will immediately think of the situation in other African countries. We know that the power supply in Zimbabwe is hardly consistent and regular. The power supply in many other African countries is pretty much on-off. However, we regard these other African countries as falling apart in many other ways; so, an intermittent power supply is hardly something new. We know that the power supply in Namibia and Botswana and other parts of Africa is at an acceptable level, but this does not apply to many other African countries.
What we should accuse ourselves of is that our country has a power supply which has fallen to meet the level of many other African countries. However, this is not so. There is a fundamental difference in our country and the power supply in countries where the power supply is inadequate. In South Africa, the power supply is fundamentally not working because of some decision or choice made by government. The power supply in countries like Zimbabwe is inadequate because of their inability to keep it going in a reasonable fashion. In South Africa, we have a situation where the power supply is off regularly on a Sunday early evening, which isn’t a period of high demand. There is no reason for the power supply to be off on a Sunday evening because of high demand. There is no reason for the power supply to be off due to maintenance. The power supply during this period is off solely because it happens to suit government and the power supply authority. It is almost comical for the power to be disconnected deliberately by government during these periods. It is quite easy to judge this. The power is switched off at various locations on a Sunday night for two or more hours at a time. Two hours on a Sunday is hardly a period of high demand. What then is the rationale behind this? Quite simply, it is a malicious disconnection of electricity by State-owned power utility Eskom to achieve some as-yet- unknown aim.
During the Economic Freedom Fighters’ recent attempted national shutdown, electricity was remarkably available, which makes one wonder how this capacity was miraculously achieved.
There is something sinister behind all this; I think it is due to a battle between various factions of Eskom and some in the private sector who hope to use the electricity supply to dominate some political gain. If this is the case, this is political meddling of the worst degree and can only be described as disgusting.
Something to regard as a positive situation is that whatever is happening certainly is not going to happen during the coming election and will never be repeated after that election. In the interim, I wish the political parties that are implementing whatever horrors we are suffering the absolute worst of outcomes.