Residents have been remarkably stoic in not taking to the streets over service delivery failures
· Citizen
On yet another rainy day in Dublin last week, I was lamenting the weather with a man in a hardware store.
Like me, he was a sun-starved South African, an East Rand homey no less, raised and schooled in Vosloorus.
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His family now live in suburban Boksburg, “with JoJos and all of that”, he said, “because the infrastructure… eish!”
We shook our heads sadly over the failing facilities, the graft, the millions wasted, the spurious tenders, the money disappearing into private bank accounts, the absence of transparency and accountability and the lack of consequences.
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Eish, indeed. In January, my mother had no electricity at home in Benoni for a full week.
Nor did anyone in her neighbourhood. Luckily, she was away visiting family in the Cape.
She had been due to return but stayed on because of the power situation – or rather the powerless situation.
The general difficulty of life without electricity aside, my mum needs it to charge her hearing aids. Without them she is cut off from the world.
So she made a plan, as did Gauteng premier Panyaza “Bathtub” Lesufi, as I’m sure did former Ekurhuleni city manager Imogen Mashazi, who flew on holiday to London in a private jet when she was in charge.
Most people can’t. Eventually, my mum had to go home, but we have now installed solar, so far saving 80kg of coal, 246kg of CO2 emissions and her sanity.
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Just in time, too, because electricity has been on and off again like the proverbial hooker’s knickers, culminating in a 24 hour outage on Thursday.
Now, Eskom plans to throttle power to Ekurhuleni over its massive unpaid power bill – the same metro that still hasn’t given my mum her electricity deposit back nearly two years after they should have.
That’s without even talking about the water flowing on the road after yet another burst pipe, but not flowing in the taps.
The situation is simply untenable. It’s said that three days after services collapse, anarchy ensues.
Frankly, I think the people of Benoni, of Ekurhuleni, of Joburg, of Gauteng, have been remarkably stoic in not taking to the streets en masse; in not marching on municipalities with burning torches.
Maybe they just can’t mobilise because they have no electricity, no way to communicate. Or maybe they’re holding on by a thread, just like the infrastructure.
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