A VIEW OF THE WEEK: We can’t switch off the post-blackout blues

Busisiwe Mkhwebane no doubt feels a little different this morning after announcing her resignation from the EFF this week.

The former Public Protector has spent a rollercoaster year in court and will climb down from the drama to have peace and quiet with her family.

But deep down, she may feel tinges of regret and confusion over what was achieved since she joined the Red Berets a year ago.

What just happened?

It’s a feeling many South Africans will share with her when they reflect on the last few years of the energy crisis.

Load shedding has not been a problem for over 200 days now, but its effects still live with us in the sky-high tariffs we have to pay.

A 12.72% bump in July came with a R200 service and network capacity charge for prepaid customers. Power utility Eskom has requested a 36.1% increase next year, all the while inflation remains around 4.4%.

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We mess up and you pay

And it seems that public anger toward the government during these hikes and blackouts has done little to bring those in power back down to earth.

Just this week, the country’s electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa admitted that it was citizens who were paying for the government’s mistakes.

“Medupi [power station] is a concern because it’s one of the newest [units we have in our fleet]. We have invested a lot of money and priced that money into the tariff, and then it is not performing as it ought to be.”

For Ramokgopa and others in government, the remedy for a problem is not to own up to it or hold those responsible to account, but to throw taxpayers’ money, through price hikes, at it and make it their problem.

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Take power now, and pay long after

On the other side, independent power producers “came to the rescue” by supplying power to Eskom during the dark days of outages, but have now locked them in long-term contracts that force them to spend for energy they do not need.

Meanwhile, it is not just the taxpayer but the average citizen that suffers.

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Living under the cold hard grip of greedy businessmen who never really “cared” and an incompetent government who has stopped pretending it ever did, those who can’t afford the price of electricity have to go it alone.

Many have turned to illegal connections, while others simply starve or create their own “load shedding” ration to try to survive.

It shouldn’t be that a government chosen by the people and a private sector that does business with people in its borders would take advantage of those they serve.

And, unlike Busisiwe, it seems we don’t have the luxury of walking away from this misadventure.

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