On Friday I was complaining how the electricity in South Africa is not fixed and that the problems with the decaying infrastructure is still very serious. This morning the entire area had no electricity so that is now twice in the last 4 days and no one is even querying why. Loadshedding has officially ended according to those in power (no pun intended) so these are just normal every day service provider hiccups instead.
I was none the wiser until I looked on the community message group this morning as I saw I had some unread messages. You literally cannot make this up as I joked on Friday lets see if we can make it through the long weekend without anymore down time. Having solar is such a blessing and you start to appreciate life far more.
The power has since been restored but I thought let me add up all the various regions in Johannesburg according to the number of faults reported and open calls or those that have not yet been fixed.
Rather depressing numbers as of now they have over 2107 reported active faults which is power outages and of those 2107 there are 1969 longer than 24 hours and have not yet been repaired. That is a huge chunk of the public in Johannesburg sitting in the dark without any electricity.
Even their call centers have broken so nothing is really working with this SOE company and they will be asking for pay increases soon enough. I am not sure if the rest of the country is experiencing the number of outages Johannesburg is so I could not say if this is nationally or a local problem.
The problem is the longer this type of non service delivery continues the less customers will remain and naturally would be looking to find electricity from other options.
This last weekend I noticed both the shopping centers are having solar installed which is going to cost the SOE a big chunk of lost revenue. Through not providing a service they are failing themselves as they are forcing their customers to find another solution. These are the customers who pay their bills on time and once they leave the entire grid is in trouble as the revenue that was once there is no longer covering the costs.
I saw this report today and this does not surprise me because any household that is late on paying the bills is immediately suspended and cut from the grid. The reconnection fees are a scam and another revenue source so why is it government buildings and offices have run up years of debt and are only now being cut? A private business or home would be cut in less than 7 days so why have they ignored their own.
Privatization cannot happen soon enough in SA as one would hope competition would help raise the bar. No one in their right mind would remain with their current service provider and possibly why they know they cannot privatize the electricity services. Failings and a sub standard service are just expected these days and you do wonder why people put up with this voting the same government back into power each time. The government does not want to educate the people because then they would be voted out of power and this is the biggest problem because the masses can be manipulated when they do not understand .
