Hello friends,
hope you are well.
No way, what! Already the last article of this week. Alright, let’s leave with this thought. This topic was on my list for a while and it was brewing at the back of my mind for months, now it’s finally made its way here.
We are now coming towards winter, and if this autumn wasn’t warm, we would probably have load shedding (1) much more than we are having right now. Load shedding is an interruption of electricity supply to avoid excessive load on the generating plant. I have already been in some important meetings when the electricity got cut off and not to mention I’ve missed some very important meetings as well due to load shedding.
I am sure there were many many South Africans who missed some really important meetings, especially when they had to close a deal, or were in the middle of discussing one online. While in many parts of the world load shedding doesn’t happen, it was my first time experiencing this sort of electricity cuts in my two years here. I have never had to worry about the electricity going down unless there was a really important reason and I have always paid my bills. It was when COVID hit that I thought about how South Africans are going to keep the economy running while implementing social distancing when we have load shedding as a national issue compared to (so far, I know no other) other countries that don’t have this sort of a problem.
Did you know?
Did you know there is an entire market of products generated around load shedding, such as the washing machine? Good thing for South Africans but more work for them too. There is a part that is on the washing machine which the user could pull out to drain the water if the electricity went down while the clothes were in the washing machine.
I was in both a happy and not a delighted shock at once, the shock that states South Africans have to live with this because products now have to be generated around this problem, and I happy for the person who made such an awesome invention in the case of the electricity going down.
Did you know?
How often the electricity went out in the case where the same business prospect had the meeting with me twice and the electricity went down twice before we got onto both those meetings. This put him and quite frankly me too off the meeting that neither of us has rescheduled. The one left looking incompetent was me, obviously. It’s something that some South Africans have learnt not to let affect them emotionally while other South Africans get angrier more and more as if there aren’t enough challenges already here.
What does this mean for South Africans if they want to be world players and not just players of the African continent?
Firstly, everyone knows, Africa has money, it’s the leaders who have misused the continent or the leaders of each country who could have done better in Africa. For all these 18 years I have been living overseas and one would have thought that the power company would find a way to invest in this most important part of the sector that involves millions of South African lives, but nope nothing has changed.
It doesn’t help …
That immoral South Africans help to ruin the lives of taxpayers in South Africa, they steal the power cables and the news keeps bringing up the crimes, i.e., 5 million worth stolen Eskom infrastructure including aluminium and copper cables have been recovered or this one, Two suspects were arrested for allegedly trying to sell 293kg of Eskom copper cables or this one, 5 cable thieves from Cape Town sentenced to 1250 years and so on…
Cable theft in South Africa is getting out of hand City power to replace copper cables as thefts get out of hand and South Africans are sick of having to fight the little issues to get the life they deserve more so when they are paying for it http://www.drakenstein.gov.za/cable-theft-hurts-us-all.
South Africa is focusing on the less fortunate forever in just one race
South Africa is focusing on the less fortunate forever in just one race but not balancing out the services for other races and for those who have earned the lives that they have and are paying their taxes, nothing is getting better for them on their pay scale and level (2). This is why so many people are seeking to leave this country as they are not seeing their taxes being used fairly to upgrade and bring forth higher standards of living.
And the question of Africa for too long is to achieve the basics that first world countries don’t ever fight for. In Africa, yes even South Africa, there are too many stupid battles to fight just to get to the basic first step level, and so to do business internationally, to play the game on the world level, we don’t even have our electricity being reliable for us and our customers to be able to sustain our own economy, so how will be become part of something substantial worldwide?
Affirmative action! Come on, guys! COVID doesn’t care! (3)
How long is South Africa going to play the affirmative action card? There were other races affected in apartheid too, and now continents around the world have people who are infected and tested positive, sorry, I mean affected by racism, xenophobia, gender-based violence, sexism, single women, BAME … etc. Today or at least before COVID you were lucky to find out what a group of people or a person has against you, lucky is the word, otherwise, you will just take it, and quit without ever knowing like myself on many instances.
South Africa, think! If affirmative action remains, it is the cause of other why people less well off. i.e., in the Indian, white, coloured communities and why they have remained that way, i.e., because they have to seek the help of wealthier Indians, whites, and coloureds leaving them still at the bottom because all employers know the situation in the country, but if affirmative action is crossed off the rich and poor gap can start to close and people will have more choices, all people, all races and everyone will have to be fairer to each other i.e., who they hire and how they treat others simply because people have options, and people aren’t desperate anymore.
There are already so many unemployed people, dead people, sick people, depressed people, disabled people, low self-esteemed people, bullied people and we still want to keep reversed apartheid, seriously! Seriously! I mean seriously guys, can we ditch the affirmative action card now and wipe the slate clean, there are already so many households struggling, i.e., black, Indian, coloured, white, Asian no one is getting anywhere in this whole COVID situation. If the law just goes back to equal rights for all, and we as citizens do the right thing, this country can take off, finally!
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by purchasing my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
