Shedding might, in other words, be to the customer’s benefit; the system might be in the middle of becoming leaner and so more efficient. Not so, as we have all found out to our dismay these past two weeks.
Note: Eskom doesn’t speak of “arbitrary blackouts” or simple “power failures” as, in more honest days, it did.
It speaks instead of the far more benign “load shedding”, a phrase which could be mistakenly interpreted as a version of annual maintenance but one that causes considerable inconvenience to customers.
The malign language of “load shedding” has another dimension. Quite cynically, the phrase implicitly focuses on the electricity system, the grid, and the power that is no longer in it.
Who feels the effects of the shedding? It’s not the system or the grid, it’s the individual consumer, or individuals in hospitals, businesses, schools.
The weight of the phrase, the direction in which it seems to go, is away from the inconvenience and frustration it causes individuals.
To be more open about “load shedding” and its effects would be to use a more transparent phrase entirely.
This language of institutional disrespect for the individual, the consumer, the little man , is everywhere apparent in South Africa today. At least we are not alone, although the local forms of doublespeak and euphemism can take some uniquely colourful forms.
What, after all, is one to make of phrases like “positive discrimination” and “historically disadvantaged”?
