If only we could redirect this enterprising spark

SA’s electricity crisis has inadvertently spawned a sophisticated underground network of young entrepreneurs. In two stories today, the Sunday Times reveals how young unemployed people are being trained — and then paid — to illegally connect homes to the grid. In Nkaneng, a small informal settlement near Rustenburg, enterprising residents chipped in to buy a transformer, poles and cables before hooking up to the electricity grid of a local mine about a kilometre away. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, the Soweto Crisis Committee this week openly admitted to wide-scale, organised training of young people to illegally connect residents to the Eskom grid.

The group’s chair, Trevor Ngwane, says the training of young people by “progressive Eskom workers” started more than a decade ago.

It involves bypassing prepaid meters and reconnecting residents to the grid after they have been cut off for nonpayment. The practice is an open secret and it seems that few Soweto residents are paying what they should for services, if anything at all.

Make no mistake, their actions are illegal and contribute to the critical situation Eskom now finds itself in.

But if only there was a way to harness the skills of these unemployed youths; to put their initiative to work in a legitimate way. Not only would it help Eskom clamp down on stolen electricity, it would also help stem SA’s soaring youth unemployment rate.

Why is the government not looking to these people to help find a solution to the country’s electricity problems? Instead, it spends what little money comes in every month on maintaining a bloated workforce, bogged down in bureaucracy.

It is not only electricity where creative thinking is needed.

Thousands of illegal miners tunnel under the earth every day in search of mineral scraps to keep food on the table. Instead of half-hearted attempts to arrest them, the government should legalise and regulate them, making them part of the solution rather than the problem.