You just never know: will we be having fried fish for supper, or will we be having raw fish? - Or perhaps no fish at all? We try to live round the inadequacies, the failures, the lies and the thievery of Ali Baba and the forty million thieves, and we’re getting better at it, believe it or not, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve solved the problem: it just means that we’ve accepted it and we’re coping with it (well, better than we did initially, and better yet every day).
It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Hard lessons must be learned. Brutal truths must be acknowledged. You need to grow a hard shell. Sacrifices must be made. Lifestyles need to be tweaked. Expectations may have to be adjusted. All those fine old moral tales, wise sayings and the like that we fed to our children – we should probably revisit them to see which are still relevant (and jettison the rest, lest we mislead them)!
Take our electricity supply company, Guesskom, for example. Their best brains have been employed – not to figure out how to supply us with an adequate electricity supply – but to create an acceptable name for their failure to do that. And so we have – TA-DA! … LOADSHEDDING!
Isn’t that great?
It could be explained – as Guesskom have indeed explained – that the phenomenon required a special name because this was not a mere “power outage” or “black-out” but in fact a system – a system, you see, whereby the whole country and all the good folk therein would share equally, the benefit of a few hours of quiet time and meditation in our over-burdened, humdrum, troubled lives – a sort of a daily Sabbath – yes – a Sabbath, of two-and-a-half hours at a time; an opportunity for reflection, contemplation and even repentance if need be (after all, so, so many of us are thieves, rapists, murderers and racist hate-mongers).
The only problem, as I see it, is that although Guesskom is publishing timetables for these beneficial pauses in our lives, it’s not sticking to them. No doubt this is not their fault (nothing ever is) – the problem is that their very own clocks are being affected by the loadshedding.
Apparently it was suggested that they could replace their electronic clocks with battery-powered clocks and they did, indeed, do that, but the batteries were – er – stolen.
They also tried old fashioned wind-up spring-powered clocks but the delicate little handies and wristies of the Guesskom employees who were especially employed for this purpose, kept suffering muscular sprains and eventually the Clockwinders' Union said, “Enough of this madness! We cannot sacrifice the health and wellbeing of our esteemed employees in this senseless rush to know the time!” – And Dali Mpofu was briefed to move the Constitutional Court for an interdict to cease and desist from this inhuman treatment. And the Court, being the tame puppy that it is, complied.
So now we simply don’t know when Guesskom and it’s troop of performing circus animals and clowns is going to throw the switch on our neighbourhood. What’s worse is the total opacity of the procedure. We don’t know which other neighbourhoods are getting the same treatment. We don’t know who’s officially exempt and who’se unofficially exempt. We don’t know which members of the ANC and the EFF own shares in the companies that import, or produce, or sell, UPS’s and inverters and solar panels and wind-driven power generators and solar water heaters or the companies that install these things. It must be a helluva business to be in, in these troubled times, but I’ll bet that we can guess. You may recall that during the COVID hoax the sale of cigarettes was banned. Banned, nogal!
Except that ONE government minister (that evil thug Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma) took ONE cigarette manufacturer which was making knock-off cigarettes locally, under her wing, and that manufacturer (and that minister no doubt) made a killing supplying the millions of South African tobacco addicts with their drug of choice.
They even interviewed the manufacturer and the Horrible (I stopped calling them “Honourable” Minister ages ago) on the 8 o’clock news. We are so inured to large-scale commercial crime (the most lucrative kind) that no-one even batted an eyelid, which is not surprising, because our dimwit minister of Claw and Oyster couldn’t possibly have been expected to grasp the complexity of the arrangement.
After all, guessing is what the rollicking fun of Guesskom is all about!
Perhaps we should use some of those dark hours to pause, contemplate and reflect on these things. And in one of those dark patches I reviewed how we now do at least have some of these things:
1) Gas. Not flatulence, but gas-powered stoves, hotplates, lights, electrical generators and so on;
2) Keeping an eye on those power outage (load-shedding, so called) schedules. By and large they keep to them but not always.
3) If you can’t afford the power storage or power generation options you need to keep flasks of hot water:
4) dinner at 6.00, or dinner at 10.00;
5) keeping the baby’s food heated in hot water;
6) showers at predetermined times;
7) studying or working by candlelight or torch;
8) ensuring that phones and computers are always fully charged;
9) budgeting to install private power solutions; etc etc.
The fun never stops.
And tonight I read that there are three towns that are ready, willing and able to generate and supply their own electricity but Guesskom is opposing it.
Opposing it! What sort of fuckery is this?
And Cape Town will come on line in a year or two. Are they going to do that to Cape Town as well?
- Guess …!
- There is only one possible explanation for this. Someone’s making a packet out of this racket.
Follow the money: but they’re keeping us guessing about that too…
ONE DAY AT A TIME
Plug that phrase into your Google search field and see what you get. No, wait, I don’t have time, I’ll just tell you: you’ll get AT LEAST FIFTY cheerful, optimistic quotes about how perseverance eventually yields success. Well, bully for you. But I think it was a famous chairman of the Chrysler company who was once asked, about a spectacular failure in the company, “How did we get here?” and his answer will ring down the ages because it is also true: “How did we get here? – One day at a time”.
I have a story lying around somewhere on my computer about that fateful Friday night in 2008 when the power went out all over Sea Point, and stayed out all night. That night we took our first tentative step on the downward spiral path into Darkest Africa – the path that we have come so far on now.
How did we get here?
One day at a time …
Failure to appreciate that just because someone gives you a motor car, doesn’t mean that you have a motor car forever: you have to learn to drive it, then you have to maintain it, with all that that entails (and it’s a lot); and at some stage you’re going to have to replace it, so plan for that too.
Harry Friedland
May 2023
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