Eskom’s blunt instrument hurts righteous and offenders alike
If you were a law-abiding township citizen, being one of several million Eskom customers, yours would be a wretched life. And you would be livid. That’s because Eskom, ever the creative communicator, has been implementing “load reduction” in a range of townships from Gauteng to Mpumalanga, the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal. It switches off, often in the morning and evening, thousands of households. Eskom says this is to prevent system overload due to illegal connections. On another occasion you might be subjected to power cuts that occur when generators start falling like dominoes. A not infrequent thing these days. Then, if you should escape all of the above, the chances are you will be in the dark because of damaged infrastructure in your neighbourhood — occasioned by the above-mentioned system overloading.
The reason for power cuts is well known: we produce less power than we need. And “load reduction”? While technically sensible, it’s wrong-headed and imposes the consequences of poor governance on citizens. System overload is a direct result of unregulated settlement expansion and poor planning. This accounts for mushrooming informal settlements and backyard structures.
Through load reduction, Eskom imposes a form of collective punishment on entire neighbourhoods, affecting the upright and the wrongdoers alike. It’s a scenario unfamiliar to suburban residents.
Where they live, each customer is treated as an individual, not part of a delinquent mob.
Importantly, what are you to do as a law-abiding township citizen who pays for the power and is not responsible for damage to Eskom’s infrastructure? Who can blame you if you eventually make common cause with the nonpayment movement?
Eskom’s approach, which disincentivises and punishes good citizen behaviour, will only swell the ranks of those who act outside the law.
To be fair, this is fundamentally a political and economic problem not of Eskom’s making. It arises from a combination of factors, key of which is the now deeply rooted culture of nonpayment for services, a carry-over from resistance days, subsequently condoned by the post-1994 government.
Eskom, essentially a business, has been thrown to the wolves by its political stakeholders, who should be searching for solutions. Nowhere to be seen are the leaders, in all political parties, who within months will beat a dusty path to every township front door, soliciting local election votes.
The government, for its part, should by now know who among the affected communities can pay but elects not to do so. It should also have a good idea who, due to indigence, genuinely cannot pay and requires state support. In addition, the authorities must address the township housing crisis through better urban planning, including de-densification.
As for illegal connections, those should be left to law enforcement.
Then there is the vexing matter of the townships’ massive power debt, which Eskom cannot resolve by itself, and requires a political solution. Local authorities are estimated to owe Eskom about R31bn. Soweto’s arrears alone are R12bn. It is unlikely that all the debt will be recovered. The situation is so dire that we now have Eskom, a government-owned enterprise, engaging in the farcical approach of suing and attaching the property of municipalities, which are also part of the government.
Eskom’s “load-reduction” strategy is likely to end in tears. It fits into the long-standing South African template, where grievances are allowed to escalate into open confrontation with the authorities before something is done. It is the same approach that gave us the Marikana tragedy, and the endemic tyreburning service-delivery protests.
And punishing and alienating law-abiding citizens is no solution.
Punishing and alienating law-abiding citizens is no solution