SA Politics Part 14 - The New Dawn turns to Dusk

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Taken off facebook , but I agree 100%

WHY DOES THE CUSTOMER WHO PAYS KEEP GETTING PUNISHED FOR EVERYONE WHO DOESN’T?
South Africans who actually buy electricity have been presented with another little masterpiece of the national electricity arrangement: pay your bill, pay more for the electricity you buy, and then apparently pay some more because an enormous number of other people, municipalities and institutions have decided that the concept of settling an electricity account is more of a suggestion than an obligation.
NERSA approved an average 8.76% increase for Eskom direct customers for 2026/27, while municipal electricity tariffs increased by an average 9.01% from July 2026. And if that wasn't sufficiently charming, NERSA is now consulting on another proposed increase of about 8.83% for 2027/28.
So the person who switches on the kettle, receives the electricity bill, opens the banking app and actually pays is once again the easiest person in the entire electricity ecosystem to find.
Eskom's municipal debt problem is not some obscure accounting technicality. In May 2026, Eskom said outstanding municipal debt had reached R111.6 billion despite National Treasury's municipal debt-relief programme and repeated interventions. Eskom had already begun taking steps against municipalities that had failed to settle their accounts for at least 18 months, had failed to meet debt-relief conditions or represented significant financial risks to the utility.
And this isn't merely a case of one or two dysfunctional municipalities having a particularly bad month. Eskom's 2025 integrated report showed that its ten biggest municipal defaulters owed R56.7 billion at year-end. Emalahleni owed R10.28 billion, Maluti-a-Phofung R8.823 billion, Emfuleni R8.227 billion, Matjhabeng R6.433 billion, Tshwane R5.655 billion, Govan Mbeki R5.483 billion and Johannesburg R4.402 billion, with Lekwa, Ngwathe and Matlosana adding billions more.
Then there is the community-level problem that nobody should pretend doesn't exist. Across parts of the country, electricity non-payment, illegal connections, meter bypassing and the refusal or failure to pay for electricity have become entrenched problems. This is not an argument that every resident in a township refuses to pay. It is an argument that millions of people cannot reasonably be expected to carry the financial consequences of people who consume electricity without paying for it, whether that non-payment occurs in a household, a community, a business or a municipal account.
And before somebody reaches for the world's smallest violin and starts explaining poverty to the people who pay their electricity bills, let's establish something rather important: the customer who pays is also living in South Africa. They buy food. They pay rent or a bond. They pay transport costs. They pay taxes. They pay school fees. They pay electricity. They are not some mysterious class of infinitely wealthy creatures whose disposable income exists specifically to subsidise everybody else's failure to settle accounts.
There is absolutely no excuse for theft, illegal connections or simply refusing to pay because somebody else has decided that electricity is a political entitlement rather than a service that costs money to generate, transmit and distribute. There is equally no excuse for municipalities collecting electricity revenue and then failing to pay Eskom. Eskom itself says the municipal debt problem has become sufficiently serious that it has had to consider interrupting supply to persistent defaulters.
The political absurdity becomes even more impressive when you remember what the municipal debt-relief programme was supposed to accomplish. National Treasury introduced it in 2023 specifically to improve municipal payment discipline. Eskom reported that by March 2025, 63 of the 71 municipalities participating in the programme were still failing to settle their current accounts as they fell due.
So we have a system in which the government creates a debt-relief programme because municipalities cannot pay Eskom, Eskom carries the debt, NERSA approves tariff increases, municipalities pass increases on to electricity customers, and the customer who actually pays is expected to keep smiling while the entire circus continues around them.
Brilliant.
And Eskom is hardly entitled to stand on a moral high horse either. The electricity price increases did not materialise from thin air, and consumers have every right to question the utility's costs, efficiency, historical failures and financial management. NERSA's job is to regulate Eskom's allowable revenue and tariffs, not to wave a magic wand and make decades of problems disappear. But none of that changes the fundamental question confronting the person who pays every month: why does compliance keep becoming more expensive while non-compliance remains so spectacularly persistent?
The answer cannot always be another tariff increase.
At some point, somebody has to confront the extraordinarily convenient economics of the South African electricity system. If you pay, you pay the bill. If you don't pay, somebody negotiates with you. If the municipality doesn't pay Eskom, there is another intervention. If the account remains unpaid, there is a debt-relief programme. If that doesn't work, there are further negotiations. Meanwhile, the electricity consumer who faithfully buys prepaid units or settles a monthly account gets the privilege of funding a system in which everybody else apparently gets a payment arrangement, a bailout, a political explanation or another chance.
And then NERSA comes along with another percentage.
8.76%.
Next year, potentially another 8.83%.
Meanwhile, Eskom's municipal debt is R111.6 billion.
Those numbers do not require a sophisticated economic theory to understand. They require one very simple question:
WHY IS THE PERSON WHO PAYS THE BILL ALWAYS THE PERSON LEFT HOLDING THE BILL?
Because the paying customer is not responsible for Eskom's historical failures. The paying customer is not responsible for municipal financial mismanagement. The paying customer is not responsible for illegal connections. The paying customer is not responsible for electricity theft. The paying customer is not responsible for municipalities failing to collect revenue. And the paying customer certainly did not agree to become the permanent emergency funding mechanism for everyone who doesn't pay.
We bought the electricity.
We paid for the electricity.
Now explain why we must keep paying for everybody who didn't.
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Nom Chompsky said:
Interesting insight from the columnist Peter Bruce - he seems to suggest there is a shift to the right amongst white South Africans.

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i dont think so much a shift to the right in terms of being more "conservative", but more a case of tiring of the da's shenanigins, infighting - along with their insatiable lust for power.

traditional da voters are exploring other options - no longer dutifully programmed to check the blue boxes
 
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