One cannot not write about State-owned electricity utility Eskom. I would love to, but it reminds me of the time that Alastair Cooke broadcast Letter From America in the UK. In those times, there was no Internet, and Cooke recorded his talk on a tape that was flown to London and broadcast two days later. This led to a difficult circumstance when President Richard Nixon was either going to be impeached or would resign. The world would know on the coming Friday. Only Cooke had to record on the Wednesday. What a fool he would look if he spoke of impeachment when in fact Nixon had resigned. So, he recorded that Nixon faced a choice and he said: “The rest you know.”

By the time this column is printed, Eskom may have collapsed further. The newly appointed experts from Italian company Enel may realise that they do not know much about Eskom coal-fired stations. Nonworking traffic lights may have backed up traffic delays to record proportions. But one thing is certain: whoever is running the power generation side of things does not know what he or she is doing. Like Oscar Wilde, to lose one generating unit is a misfortune. To lose seven is carelessness. And then to get in a green power company to tell Eskom what to do! Hello? Hello?

Unlike many, I have actually run a power system (the Eastern Cape, if you were to enquire) and it stands out like a bright light on the road to Damascus what is required to fix the power generation system. In no order: (a) Fix the coal supply. Those power stations that were supplied by coal conveyors where the coal conveyors have been bypassed and replaced by trucks must be reinstated. (b) Each coal truck must have an escort to the driver to make sure it collects the correct coal from the correct colliery and delivers it to the correct stockpile at the correct power station – with no bypassing the route.

(c) All the operations staff must pass a ‘driving test’ on a simulator, preferably in Europe, to make sure they can actually operate a boiler or generator and are just not the brother of the power station manger by qualification. (d) All outages involving loss of amounts of 2 000 MW of load or more must be investigated by a non-Eskom team headed by power system engineers. This team must produce reports for each incident, even in preliminary form, 14 days following the incident.

The current situation is that corruption in the coal supply system means that boilers are running on low-calorie, high-ash coal, which results in incidents like the Duhva and Lethabo boiler explosions.

In the interim, one has to roll one’s eyes at the benefits of load-shedding: staff come to work late, owing to traffic lights not working. Contractors fail to meet targets, owing to nonexistent and late deliveries. Building sites stop work, since there is no power for hoists and mixers and vibrators. Builders refuse to cast slabs, since they will be unable to agitate them through the night to ensue they cure properly.

It gets even better. The local hardware store, which until last week was selling about two portable gensets a week, has doubled its prices and is now selling, um, two gensets a week. From out of nowhere, ‘friends’ who have long forgotten me and have not asked me to a braai or for drinks in decades phone me up and, after a few pleasantries, ask me how much electricity their house uses and can they watch TV, use a gaming station with a 1 kVA genset. And how to hook it up. Even my dear lawyer, whose fees match the hourly operating costs of a gas turbine, advised he could not get some papers out due to, uh, load-shedding. No stone unturned.