WUC ABANDONS SHEBEEN POLICY

The Chief Executive Officer of Water Utilities has announced that beginning next month his corporation will stop estimating how much water a household has consumed and bill it according to such estimation. This is indeed good news and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why WUC had to use that shebeen policy in the first place. For those who may not be aware of how shebeens operate ( especially ones that operate round the clock), the VIP class of customers doesn’t pay after each purchase but runs a tab that they pay either when they stagger back to their cars or home - or the following day. High- end restaurants also do the same thing but the difference is that waiters enter each sale on a computer. At a shebeen, none of that happens. Instead, the shebeen queen ( or her daughters) estimate how many beers a VIP customer drank and all too often, the estimation is also based on how well- oiled the customer was when he left.

Note that if a shebeen queen has four daughters who sell beer, there will be five different bills and if a dispute arises with regard to which one is correct, the final arbiter ( the shebeen queen) always insists on the one with the highest amount.

Shebeen queens also have a memory so excellent that they can remember things that never actually happened: “You ordered four Black Label quarts for the nightclub DJ and two Savanna six packs for his baby mama. When I pulled you aside to caution you on your reckless spending, you exploded in bombastic English. Oh! and you also bought me eight beers.” In the end, the VIP customer ends up paying huge sums of money for alcohol that he never consumed – much like WUC customers who end up paying thousands of pula for water they never consumed.