SA doesn’t need daylight saving, time zone change

I THOUGHT the debate over daylight saving in South Africa was over years ago. Until, that is, I saw what I can only describe as a pair of utterly ridiculous letters from Mike Edgar and Roy Israelite (The Star, Monday, November 24)

For a start, daylight saving works in UK and other countries in the northern hemisphere because they are much further from the equator than South Africa and have a vastly greater difference between day and night in summer and winter than does South Africa.

Secondly, Mr Edgar suggests we are in the wrong time zone. I’d suggest he look at a map of the world’s time zones, and then he’d realise that with the exception of Cape Town, which is a bit too far to the west and should be one hour ahead of GMT, not two, the rest of South Africa falls squarely in the two hours ahead of GMT time zone.

Despite this, Mr Edgar wants to put South Africa permanently three hours ahead of GMT. Apart from the fact that this would give poor old Cape Town a sunrise time of past 9am in winter, I wonder if it has even crossed his mind that the majority of people in this country have to get up very early in order to get to work via public transport. And somehow I doubt whether they would prefer to do that in the dark rather than in the light!

For the majority of the country (and I exclude Cape Town and the most westerly parts of the Western Cape), sunrise ranges between around 5am in midsummer and 7am in midwinter. And that’s absolutely fine – and it certainly doesn’t need tampering with by the likes of Mr Edgar and Mr Israelite, both of whom should be ignored.

The bottom line is that we simply don’t need daylight saving in South Africa. And we certainly don’t need a change of time zone! End of story!