Where is our power? Where is Eskom?

1 August 2018

In South Africa, we have a power supplier that struggles to supply power. The name of the company is Eskom

Eskom logo

Yesterday Eskom started load shedding again.
Load shedding is all about switching some parts of a cities’ or towns’ off so that power is saved. People are basically forced to save power. Sounds a little crazy, right? In South Africa, we are so used to this, that we don’t find it strange at all any more. It is become a “normal” part of our lives.
The schedule is usually for three hours at a time. At least in the area where I live.
BUT. In the area I live in, we do not only suffer power outages during load shedding times. We lose power for more or less any reason. Sometimes when the wind blows hard or five drops of rain fall, we have a power outage. When this happens, we can be without power for at least 3-4 hours at a time. We have these power outages at least two times in a month. Our municipality also seems unable to fix whatever causes these outages.
This is day one of my “one post a day” experiment. I did not really want to moan about something on my first post. Unfortunately it had to start this way. I hope I will not be complaining about some kind of lack of service provision for the rest of this month.

Eskom consequences

Blog-a-day-June… Wednesday, 13 June
In South Africa, we have Eskom, our power provider.
Over the last few years, there were a lot of corruption taking place in South Africa, and Eskom were not spared. A lot of money were lost in this way.
It was announced recently that workers will not get a salary raise, due to lack of money. Perfectly understandable.
The issue is this, though: the workers seems to be carrying the consequences of years of bad decisions and corruption by politicians and top management.
I don’t like the possible consequences of a possible strike by workers at Eskom, but I think I support the plight of the workers at Eskom in this case. I really hope that there will not be negative consequences for country at large.