SIPHAMANDLA ZONDI

We have become daily victims of power blackouts nicely termed load shedding. We also are experts in evading potholes even in affluent areas.

This year, there has hardly been a day without a shortage of power, a basic need for a simple livelihood in South Africa.

We need electricity to prepare food, to follow news, to learn and read. We need it to use current technologies to communicate with others.

This power lights up dangerous roads, making it difficult for criminals to pounce on us.

Driving in the dark renders us drivers helpless in daily efforts to avoid potholes even in city centres, itself an embarrassing failure of our postcolony.

Driving through the streets of the towns of Standerton and Balfour in south-western Mpumalanga recently was painful for this reason. Various provincial and regional roads in Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape recently tested my car swerving skills.

I surely have gained some arm muscles from swerving every now and then. We think something is wrong if drive in a straight line down Nelson Mandela Avenue in Standerton.

Thankfully it was all driving in the daylight. At night without street lighting due to stage 7 load shedding we are ashamedly accustomed to, it should be deadly.

Indeed, a petrol attendant in Standerton told me of terrible car accidents on these roads when I inquired. Some special signs meant to warn road users about “potholes ahead” had slumped having been run over by, I suspect. I saw a car that had left the road into a little ditch after hitting a pothole or two.

The warning signs say authorities know the job is not done. They don’t say we are fixing the road but they say survive our lack of fixing by driving cautiously. They do not care.

It is their time to eat, not to serve.

The responses to this energy problem have many proverbial potholes too that so many have spoken about. One key pothole is like the slumped warning signs near Balfour, people do not know the plans, the immediate ones and long-term ones.

Like the watch out for potholes signs, authorities seem more focused on helping us to avoid sliding into complete despair and defeatism than actually ensuring change immediately.

There is a lot of assurance that something is being done. There is an invitation to us to trust those in charge to find solutions.

There is nice talk and wry smiles.

The roadworks signs on the roads I travelled on gave hope that there is fixing happening, but there was not. Instead, the fixers had left open big ditches perhaps to be filled with some cement to make the road strong later, but I saw one car that had fallen into a fixer’s open trench.

Similarly, the responses and plans for electricity seem to look like those trenches, giving much hope but posing much danger too. One danger is that with these excellent assurances and convincing talk we may be lulled into hoping that the voices that speak mean business.

Like trenches, this talk can trap us in trenches of disappointment as we try to exit the crisis.

A few weeks ago, South Africa had a prominent presence at the Conference of Parties negotiating on climate change in Sham El-Sheik, Egypt. We hear that big western powers saw us as an experiment in an externally financed transition from coal-based energy towards more low-carbon energy sources, the renewables.

These states that have been backtracking on their own commitments to deepen energy transitions position themselves as champions of energy transition in developing countries. Hundreds of billions in Rands were pledged in a new initiative in this direction.

These pledges give hope that South Africa might just raise this R1. 5 trillion it says it needs to undertake its energy transition to renewables by 2027, according to the Presidential Climate Change Commission.

At that point, it is said,the country will not only have stable energy supply but a cleaner type of energy.

But then pledges are like trenches on the side of roads in Standerton. They inspire hope of reconstruction, only to trap us in external dependence without clear certainty about the return on investment.

Recently, Zambia where 75% of energy comes from the wonders of hydropower technology announced energy blackouts beginning in two weeks. There you are, a pothole warning sign. The reason is that this great energy technology built at huge costs depends on steady water flows from the Zambezi River into the Kariba Hydropower Dam.

But water levels have fallen to significant lows that it threatens energy supplies to both Zambia and Zimbabwe that share this energy facility.

This is a reminder that this beautiful energy that is trumpeted and sold to us is contingent on the vagaries of nature or the interventions of the divine.

Eskom was very confident in Egypt that we are making this transition and increasing the turn to renewables. Coal fired power station are a thing of the past, it said.

In Standerton, the worst road is one named after Nelson Mandela, a symbol of hope that in this case is a sign of failure, incompetence and lack of care.

This is as if a symbolism that the authorities are in their conduct and lack of performance deliberately spitting on Mandela and his representation of the better life for all vision.

At the corner of Nelson Mandela and the main road to Kinross, two mobile containers have young black guys running quite a lucrative business of changing and fixing car tyres in minutes. They bring relief to victims of potholes and dark streets.

They do their work with much energy and excitement, they entertain distressed motorists as they fix their tyres. When the job is done they tell you exactly where the most dangerous potholes in the better conditioned provincial road to Delmas or Emerlo or Volkrust.

These the entrepreneurs have seized business opportunities that have come with load shedding and potholes. They prevent stress, they cushion the vagaries of the mammoth failure of the postcolony. They let people buy time until the promised end of crisis. Sheer ingenuity is most likely during calamities.

The talk of transition to better energy and roads is paved with hope and faith, the destination is heaven of energy mix where there shall be endless economical energy for all. Is this the misleading construction sign on the side of the road?

Let me ready the generator to run as the efficient Eskom technology can warn us about an impending new round of energy blackout, but it can’t prevent it or assure us of energy security. Such is our resigned existence in the postcolony.

See you when the power briefly comes back. Cheers.

Professor Siphamandla Zondi is the Director of the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.

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