Our parents are living in fear of dying in the dark

With the latest bout of Eskom loadshedding, I was having a conversation with a friend about how precise the schedule is in my neck of the woods. I have found that this has been the same with most areas — 12 o’clock is 12 o’clock and not a minute later. We even agreed that if our local government were to approach all other service delivery with the same level of commitment Eskom has invested in the rollout of load-shedding, we could have been a better country.

Mother lives in a rural village on the KwaZuluNatal south coast. Her life experiences have been starkly different from mine. Service delivery does visit in and around voting season and they get more rain than water from the municipal tanker. The only service that is a constant is electricity, which happens to be the most expensive.

Our biggest worry with load-shedding has always been the safety of mother, an elderly woman living with my younger brother who is intellectually challenged. They enjoy an erratic load-shedding schedule and are sometimes without power all night. This, in a neighbourhood that has become popular for vicious criminals, including a serial killer.

The last time the country was cast into loadshedding, my brother was stabbed multiple times in the head, in the yard at home. Ordinarily, he would have been able to at least see the perpetrators from the little lighting there is outside the house on the veranda. He didn’t. ’Til this day, mother recounts having to hold a cellphone torch to his head to locate the wounds.

I was constantly on the phone with her as the neighbours were arranging for him to be rushed to the clinic. She saw three wounds. Five minutes later, there was another. Then a few minutes later, she realised there were a couple more.

Just as we were starting to forget that trauma, this week mother woke me up with a phone call to say her TV set and cellphone were gone, along with the lounge window. A few other items were missing. She was unsettled at having slept through a burglary while her bedroom door was open.

True to my nature, I have been joking about mother’s ordeal. The thing is, some years ago her neighbours were victims of a home invasion that left the community puzzled. They were bereaved and relatives had gathered to stay at the home. In the morning, many of them found themselves waking up on the floor, with all their valuables gone. The beds too. Yep, criminals had entered the home, and meticulously lifted a couple of heavy men and women and neatly laid them on the floor before running off with their blankets, bags, cellphones and cash. We have been laughing at the possibility of her waking up in the passage with her spectacles in her hand as she sometimes grabs them off the bedside table and falls asleep holding them. She is still struggling to figure out exactly what else is missing from the house.

Her biggest worry now is that her bedroom door is on the side of her blind eye (she was partially blinded by a stroke). She is anxious about the possibility of the robbers having entered her bedroom. Her fear is that she may have been awake at the time people entered her house and, even if they did come into her bedroom, she would not have seen them.

Mother is not the only victim in the area of crimes committed during load-shedding. It has been rampant. The target is specifically households with elderly folks who are helpless in the dark. We are fortunate that this time no-one was injured.

It seems there’s been more focus on the effects of load-shedding on the economy and urban lifestyle while the majority of our indigent people become vulnerable to criminal elements during every three-hour period of darkness. They do not have alarms with backup battery power. Some do not even have nearby neighbours who will hear their screams. And, worst of all, there is no schedule for their area’s load-shedding.

I hope that in his brilliant plans to end this power crisis, President Cyril Ramaphosa has not forgotten the elderly, poor people in remote areas. Our parents are living in fear of dying in the dark.

She was unsettled at having slept through a burglary while her bedroom door was open