Load shedding is back in full force as it all kicked off last night starting at 5pm. South Africa has lasted nearly 10 months by calling hit something else "load sharing" were it seems certain areas were hit harder than others. I know the area where our warehouse is located had power cuts almost daily over the last year. Having the load shedding lists makes this more official and has caught so many people off guard.
This is not good for the economy especially when South Africa already leads the way with unemployment stats worldwide. Those numbers will slowly increase which will only increase the crime numbers which are already horrendous. The forecast for businesses is not good long term ad I do not know wat the answer is besides applying common sense politics which will not happen.
Last night whilst in the supermarket the power went off and took a good 30 minutes to get the generator working. I never had my phone with me so it was literally shopping in the dark getting glimpses of the shelves when someone walked past with their flashlight from their phone. The store was pitch black and I waited this one out and was more of an inconvenience. Normally the store generator kicks in immediately and shows how unprepared they were.
There has been a lot of talk of late as Blackrock has purchased 45% of the Eskom (SOE) debt. Eskom wanted to implement a 36% price increase and was only allowed to increase by 12.7%. This was not received very well and now we have load shedding. Eskom made R16 billion in profits last year ($1 billion) whilst not really offering a service and still burning over R4 billion in diesel. This is all about profiteering and corruption with the country coming second.
Eskom are using strong arm tactics as they wanted far more than 12.7% and is holding the country to ransom even when they do have sufficient power. The bigger play here is not the load shedding, but to create enough chaos so the SOE can be privatized by certain government officials for themselves. This I do believe is the plan and has been the plan all along and could possibly involve Blackrock running this power utility in the future. Privatization ca only be considered as an option when a SOE is failing and this has been failing for over 15 years and this year they will purposely make it fail even worse than last year. The masses are too simple to see what is going on as the majority are uneducated and they are kept that way for a reason.
I am not really affected these days as I have solar but could be affected if the services are not switched back on due to faulty sub stations. The problems arise with the switching on and off multiple times per day and the substations blow things which takes hours to fix which could leave you without power for 12 hours or longer. Day time I am fine, but the night is where I am vulnerable as I do not have enough battery to make it right through.
There are may other stories going on round electricity and will discuss this in my monthly solar post tonight. This is Africa so nothing is ever normal and there are games within games taking place.
