Through My Eyes

While it is really cool spending time listening to the soothing tones of the neighbourhood's generators, enjoying my outdoor pizza oven and Moroccan tagine stove, the idea of a simple life was not making much of an impression on me.

The load-shedding is honestly getting me down. Its not that I can't do without the power for two hours a day, it's the waste of productivity and our human resources, the sheer waste of our work time and not forgetting the cost to repair and replace broken computers, fried television sets, blown up fridges, hissing espresso machines - should I go on. Today I'm thoroughly peeved.

Have you noticed what happens when the power goes down at 2pm? Not many people stay at work and wait for it to come back on, its home time for most, not many employees seem concerned or think it appropriate to catch up the time that has been lost in load-shedding. Screw that! At 2:30pm they are on their coach or their favourite pub with a cold beer thanking Jacob for a job well done.

It is the business owners and landlords who suffer most. My last TV repair bill was R3500, plus R350 call out fee and the list goes on. The money we are forking out daily for fuel to feed the generators, for food going off in restaurants because we just cannot cope with the numbers on the energy that we are producing ourselves. That money is lost forever.

If you do not have the electricity required to do your work, you cannot generate an income. Let me play a theoretical number based on past experiences - if you are without power for 3 hours out of a 8 hour workday, an averaged to three days a week, that is 9 hours out of 40, roughly 23% of your normal working hours.

So business owners either need to increase productivity without additional workforce by 23%, increase their cost to customer by 23%, OR cut costs (e.g. workforce) by 23% while still maintaining the same outputs that is excluding the nett effect.

I don't know about you, but it's a simple equation. We are all potentially looking at 23% less food on our shelves, or the same amount of food at a 23% increased cost.

A simplified example as the knock on effect can be compounded. Our simple lives are becoming way too expensive to be economically viable; I can only imagine what the poorest of the poor must be going through.

The scary thing is that Eskom's inability to provide us with clean energy to do our business is costing us, South Africans R170 billion in loss growth per annum. Now that's chilling!

We, the people, are not interested in all the excuses and justifications about power outages and incompetence etc. Eskom and Government must get their act together and in a matter of months, give us, the people a stable supply of adequate power or else we're heading for a disaster of monumental proportions! Nobody wants that but it's inevitable.

Sorry for the rant! I hope you all keep the light shining in the sense of humour department as we continue on the journey of load-shedding.