The country is in ruins and notwithstanding the recent chimera of a growth in GDP, we are entering a dark, literally, state of affairs. Electricity is a necessity for the country just to stay still, let alone grow. We can’t operate a household, let alone a serious country, with generators.
We have to learn to pay for what we get and if we don’t pay... we don’t get. But that is not the case in SA at least as far as Eskom is concerned. Everyone gets electricity and doesn’t pay – or at least millions of us, including whole municipalities.
If I go into the local top-end car dealership and ask for a R1m car, I must have the million bucks to pay for it or have a bank willing to pay the car guy, knowing that there is a better than even chance that I will pay the bank back over time. That’s a pretty basic fact anywhere you go.
The principle that you can get only what you pay for in real money terms apparently is not the case with regards to Eskom. There are millions of people and municipalities who are getting free electricity; not because they are going to pay cash money to the bank/Eskom/government but because they are holding promissory notes that they will continue to vote for the ANC government; ie, we will continue to vote for the most corrupt, incompetent, malignant government on the planet, but the trade-off (one of the many) is that they give us free electricity.
Poor André de Ruyter is the fall guy for the crumbling electrical company because it, Eskom, just hasn’t bothered to do a dot of maintenance over the “missing years” and now the chickens have come home to roost. Humpty Dumpty just cannot be put together again. So sad.
Dr Peter C Baker, Parktown North, Johannesburg
READER LETTER | Chickens coming home to roost, in a ruined country
Image: Freddy Mavunda
The country is in ruins and notwithstanding the recent chimera of a growth in GDP, we are entering a dark, literally, state of affairs. Electricity is a necessity for the country just to stay still, let alone grow. We can’t operate a household, let alone a serious country, with generators.
We have to learn to pay for what we get and if we don’t pay... we don’t get. But that is not the case in SA at least as far as Eskom is concerned. Everyone gets electricity and doesn’t pay – or at least millions of us, including whole municipalities.
If I go into the local top-end car dealership and ask for a R1m car, I must have the million bucks to pay for it or have a bank willing to pay the car guy, knowing that there is a better than even chance that I will pay the bank back over time. That’s a pretty basic fact anywhere you go.
The principle that you can get only what you pay for in real money terms apparently is not the case with regards to Eskom. There are millions of people and municipalities who are getting free electricity; not because they are going to pay cash money to the bank/Eskom/government but because they are holding promissory notes that they will continue to vote for the ANC government; ie, we will continue to vote for the most corrupt, incompetent, malignant government on the planet, but the trade-off (one of the many) is that they give us free electricity.
Poor André de Ruyter is the fall guy for the crumbling electrical company because it, Eskom, just hasn’t bothered to do a dot of maintenance over the “missing years” and now the chickens have come home to roost. Humpty Dumpty just cannot be put together again. So sad.
Dr Peter C Baker, Parktown North, Johannesburg
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