Mike Siluma
Are we to share the darkness or the light?
Most mornings, the leading talk radio station in Gauteng rounds off its news bulletins by naming parts of the province where Eskom’s “load reduction” is in effect.
Dutifully, it implores those affected to not report the outages. To the privileged who live in suburbia and never experience it, the innocuously sounding load reduction entails enforced, hours-long power cuts.
It occurs when Eskom, during morning and afternoon peak hours, deliberately switches off whole neighbourhoods in townships and villages. This is supposed to prevent network overloading in “highdensity areas”, such as Soweto and similar places around the country.
The phenomenon is but one of the myriad power provision problems faced by Eskom — in this case the result of poor settlement planning by the government and a paucity of imaginative solutions from Megawatt Park.
It is also indicative of the authorities’ worrisome approach to solving social or political problems affecting the majority of citizens, who happen to be less affluent, and whose issues have remained on the periphery of our national focus over the past 27 years.
Here the authorities’ attitude seems to be to do little or nothing about problems. That is, until and unless the disaffection overflows into public unrest or violent, potentially fatal, protest, whether it’s over poor municipal services, tertiary education funding or unemployment, the biggest social threat facing SA today.
The problem of illegal power connections is an old one, for which there seems to be little appetite to find a solution.
The wonder in all of this is that many of the politicians and other key decision-makers on the matter are themselves originally from these “high-density” locations.
Having escaped to the suburbs, where things run infinitely better, they seem remarkably unmoved by the hardship faced by those they left behind, including family and friends.
To return to the radio announcements. It should rank as counterintuitive to beg citizens to not report outages in a country that claims to aspire to world-class standards and excellence.
It amounts to asking citizens to accept their wretched conditions and to see poor-quality service as a fact of life — sadly, as we all have done after all the years of power cuts.
Eskom’s reason for “load reduction” is supposedly to deal with illegal connections that endanger its system. Understandable. Except it translates to a form of collective punishment, affecting the miscreants and the law-abiding.
Some apologists for the state’s failure to resolve the electricity crisis have pleaded for understanding. They point out that, whereas the apartheid state focused on providing for a minority at the expense of the majority, the post-1994 government faces a bigger challenge because it must cater for everyone.
Under the new dispensation, it is said, the people must share. Indeed, a noble sentiment in one of the most unequal countries on earth. But the most important national question is whether, in the final analysis, the sharing leads to social progress (with everyone enjoying a quality life) or regression (with a lowered standard of living)?
In the case of electricity, for instance, are we sharing a diminishing commodity, instead of striving to generate enough to keep the lights on for everyone? In other words, are we sharing the darkness or the light?
And when it comes to land redistribution, what is it we want to share? Equitable ownership with decreasing productivity or with greater food security for all? It would appear to be the wiser thing to pursue food security with the same vigour we do the search for fair ownership.
Even the famous Freedom Charter, seen by many as the blueprint of a new and better SA, was specific about what was to be shared. “The people,” it promised, “shall share in the country’s wealth.” Not in the nation’s poverty or hunger.
Already, our population is growing faster than our economic growth. What, therefore, should be front and centre of our national discourse should be the question of how to grow the proverbial cake that is to be shared.
But also, we should be seized with how to increase access for the millions of citizens trapped in poverty and marginalised from the economic mainstream.
Fortunately, history has been kind to us as a country as we seek to reconstruct SA into a more equal and fairer society.
History has, in the story of Zimbabwe, placed before our very eyes an object lesson that we can take to heart or ignore at our peril.
Looking at the dire state of our neighbour to the north, we might have forgotten that it was once a selfsufficient food exporter. Until it embarked on land and economic reforms that, while well-intentioned at face value, given Zimbabwe’s history, brought that country well-nigh to its knees, leading many Zimbabweans who could to flee to greener pastures abroad.
In the wake of the devastation, the Zimbabwean government eventually reversed aspects of its earlier interventions, offering financial compensation or resettlement for white farmers who had lost land during the reform process.
The point is, instead of believing our own propaganda of SA’s exceptionalism, we should be humble enough to learn from the mistakes of other countries on the continent and heed history’s free lessons. Among the most important being the age-old one, that the road to hell can be paved with good intentions, and ultimately turn a people’s dream into a living nightmare.
History has been kind to us as a country as we seek to reconstruct SA into a more equal and fairer society