Luckily my small business’s landlord has a generator. A big one.
Whenever #loadshitting hits, there is that 30-second silence and darkness until the generator kicks in. You seem to hear the generator, but it’s the one at the next-door offices in Craighall. We can hear the neighbour’s generator, but not our building’s. But, like all the strangeness of our Eskom-influenced lives, there is a symmetry to it. The generators, clearly automated, take roughly the same time to start up.
Every now and again I mutter darkly to myself: this is the real sound of the new dawn. It’s the sound of 112l of diesel being burnt every second just to keep the lights on.
The biggest technology challenge in SA right now is power. Or the lack of it.
Small business is disproportionately affected by #loadshitting — past tense #loadshat — as this sector is by all fluctuations in the economy.
Right now the small businesses that prosper are not necessarily those with a better product offering, or superior technology; they are the ones that have a generator. Or can afford a solar-inverter-battery setup. It’s not the best and brightest who will prosper, but those who can provide the mere basics: electricity.
It’s not the best and brightest who will prosper, but those who can provide the mere basics: electricity
Just keeping the power on for cellular base stations is a monstrous task. Vodacom and MTN are fighting a low-grade civil war to keep the comms on — as the networks struggle to recharge batteries and keep them charged because of the severity of stage six blackouts, scoundrels steal them. These few lifelines of connectivity are being literally stolen away from the local communities, because they are the only things left to steal.
A doctor’s room in a well-heeled suburb had its entire solar-inverter-battery system stolen one night. It was worth R340,000. That GP can now not operate his practice when the power is out. It’s Lord of the Flies stuff.
Providing your own power — for up to 10 hours a day — is now part of the cost of doing business. SA’s economy was limping before those two devastating years of lockdown shattered what was left. To have survived Covid means that a small business is made of hardy stuff. It would have to; SA has an utterly incompetent small business development minister in Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams. Where are her department’s plans to help this sector? In fact, where is she?
This weekend I took my son to see his beloved Springboks play at Loftus, where, thankfully, they won. As we left, we drove through a darkened Pretoria. No traffic lights, no streetlights, no commerce. It was like a morbid scene from a Wim Wenders movie.
That horde of happy, hungry, thirsty rugby fans had nowhere to celebrate (unless they brought their own skottel braai and cooler of beer) and the surrounding businesses lost out on millions in potential revenue.
The experience was repeated when I drove home from Pretoria. As we went through the suburbs around my house, everything was dark. Except our house. My wife and I spent a small fortune last year insulating ourselves against these rolling blackouts. It has paid for itself by now, in frustration alleviation alone, I’m sure.
One would hope that the solar installers are at least having a boom. Our own suppliers barely have time to sleep, they’re so busy. At least one sector is flourishing, while the rest of the country struggles just to turn the lights on.
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff Studios and publisher of Scrolla.Africa
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