Eskom must leave the power to the people

With Eskom literally crumbling around its own ears, isn’t it time government relinquished its stranglehold on power production?

Every itsy bitsy teeny weeny electron produced must go through Eskom, which then sends it on to large metropoles to disburse as needed, while Eskom works with the outer areas of each urban centre.

And when a city’s power supply is as rickety as Joburg’s, it has an incredible knock-on effect when that power, ironically sometimes through no fault of Eskom’s, becomes a problem.

The city’s power grid seems as if it is being held together with baling wire and duct tape and about as reliable as a politician’s promise. Rainstorms knock suburbs out for days; traffic lights for weeks.

As I write, people inundate City Power’s Twitter account with complaints of being unattended to for days.

Bryanston, Lotus, Wemmer Pan, Lenasia South, Marlboro, Ennerdale, Alexandra, Westdene, Jabulani, Nancefield, Tshepisong, Mulbarton, Bez Valley, Wemmer again – and more.

Then, in between the outages, there are messages from City Power like: “We are aware of some areas in Blocks 16 that were not able to restore after load shedding scheduled between 06:00-08:30. Team will attend to it. Apologies for the inconvenience caused^HN”.

And every time I read “outage”, I see “outrage” – and there is a lot of it. I feel for the communication team. They are not the ones fixing the faults, but they catch all the flak.

“It has been 17 hours since I logged a query with Ref CPWEB3047874 and even now, our house is still without power. I made several follow-ups only to receive unattended computerised messages that say we will attend to your query,” tweeted a frustrated @TebogoZB2Naboom.

And I’m guessing like in most of its responses, all City Power could say was “a team has been dispatched”. Which, of course, means little to @TebogoZB2Naboom.

Whoever was handling the social media account had not responded at the time of writing. Probably because he or she was banging their head against the desk because, again, they can only relay the information they’ve been given. Still.

How is it our power supply is less effective than a police minister’s Woman’s Day speech against gender-based violence?

Not only is our grid as wonky as a Joburg driver in rush hour traffic – because boet, I gotta be at the next red robot first so I can like to read my phone – it is about as delicate as an impugned crook still employed by government.

Substations are no longer secured, anyone with a can opener can steal the copper in them. Cables are dug up and stolen, power is stolen, load shedding irritates substations older that my 300-year-old knees, shifting schedules, Eskom and metropoles unable to agree on where when and how load shedding must happen…it’s never going to end.

Give us ordinary people power.

Right now, few can afford the R100k needed to go off the grid that’s off most of the time. Government, local government, can give us subsidies. There’s so much sun in this country so how genius are we?

Seems like we’re still dragging our knuckles when we walk and all government is doing is piling rocks on our backs.