How to solve Africa’s power problems

I take back everything I ever said about dreams. They are the most deliciously unreal fantasies and I wouldn’t want to go without one for a single day – or night.

Just last week I managed to solve our country’s chronic electricity shortage without literally even batting an eyelid.

Somewhere between 4am and 5am I was the biggest hero, being carried shoulder-high through the streets of Joburg and given a ticker-tape parade.

Phase I of my plan was simple: All I did was connect every single gym bicycle in the country to a generator that produces electricity whenever some fitness fanatic peddles along for his or her physical pleasure. The power generated is fed into the national grid, and voila! Half the problem solved.

What made this plan so brilliant was the fact that gyms are at their busiest when the electricity demand is at its peak – early morning and early evening.

I was on the front page of every local newspaper.

Phase II was even better.

I developed HPEGPPs. That’s Human Powered Electricity Generating Power Plants. They were everywhere. Not just in SA, but all over the continent. It was like the gym, but bigger. Much bigger.

Thousands of bicycles lined up in air-conditioned centres so that unemployed people could pop in, peddle for a few hours, and get paid for the electricity they generated. Of course, free water and showers were provided. It was an instant hit.

I created more jobs than both the ANC and Zanu-PF combined could destroy, and Africa was now lit up like a Christmas tree day and night. The added health benefits were a world first.

But the biggest coup was Phase III, where prisons were converted to HPEGPPs.

Criminals could now choose between being sentenced to doing time, or to producing a predetermined measure of electricity.

I was now world famous.

I just made one mistake: I should have negotiated television rights to broadcast the ANC’s top six spending their first hour in their orange tracksuits on their prison bicycles.

Because to see that, would be priceless.

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