Forget about Free State, Eskom, what about Soweto?

There is an enormous elephant in the Eskom room … but it is no surprise at all that no one in the ANC can recognise it.

Even as the state power utility threatened to cut off power to Bloemfontein and some other Free State towns to force them to pay their electricity arrears, there was silence about what might happen to the gargantuan debt accumulated in the ANC heartland, Soweto.

According to Eskom’s figures, Soweto owes more than R18 billion for electricity supplied. That is more than the cumulative R17 billion owed by all the other defaulting municipalities in South Africa.

If Eskom is to have the proverbial snowball’s hope in hell of surviving as a going concern in the years ahead, then all its debts must be recovered.

But we doubt whether there will be more than token moves to get defaulting residents of the largest township in the country to pay. There are too many actual and potential voters there for the ANC to risk alienating them, even outside of an election year.

Other methods to try to bring in revenue from electricity have failed dismally in Soweto. When Eskom technicians have tried to install pre-paid electricity meters, they have been assaulted and threatened with death. There have been no prosecutions for this criminality.

Nor has anything been done to curb the rampant theft of power through illegal electricity connections, and the culture of theft of national resources has become entrenched.

It is amazing that the ANC can haul out the “user pays” principle when that same idea is not applied in Soweto. While it would be easy to urge Eskom to cut off power to Soweto, as it is threatening to do in the Free State, many honest Sowetans would also be affected… so there is no easy solution.

Ultimately, though, this sort of lawlessness is what destroys a country.

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