Like i said in another thread:
The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer
No, this is a case of everyone getting poorer (except some BEE "coal" "suppliers" and some other corrupt individuals), but the poor will not be the worst hit, as they get free electricity anyway, so they are unlikely to bother to try curb their usage unless it's already over the free allocation, EVERYONE except the very rich will have to tighten their belts, and even the very rich will be paying more. Businesses will be hardest hit of all, but the (non-upper)middle classes will "feel this" the most, people like the average forum user here.
That line is trotted out and repeated like a religious mantra and sounds cynically clever but historically it just isn't true, if it was we'd all be starving to death in the veld by now, overall, in the long term, things are getting for everyone. There are always ups and downs, but nobody notices the ups, they just complain on the downs. 100 years ago nobody in SA had electricity at all, we had hardly any dams, there was far less agriculture, far less food, far less water, nearly no drinking water, no cars, no TVs, no microwaves, no cellphones, few schools/universities etc. etc. ... no, things are not bad at all, the "poor" by and large even seem to have excess disposable income to spend on luxuries like fancy hairdos, boozing it up, cellphones etc., we've long since passed the point where people are starving to death here (just 150 - 200 years ago), and the far greater wealth of the country allows a far greater population to be supported and fed and clothed than ever before.
I know literally hundreds of people who have gone from poor to middle class just in the last decade or two, in fact there are about 4 million in this country alone just in one sector of society. The flaw in the reasoning is that once a poor person becomes rich, we no longer consider them people, instead of saying "hmm, yes, poor became rich after all", they just BECOME regarded as the evil "rich" people you refer to in the mantra, and "the poor" of course "remain" poor because it is by definition that "the poor" are "poor" (the flaw is that "the poor" is not a static set, members are always entering and leaving).
Almost everyone I graduated with has gone from owning virtually nothing, to owning cars/houses etc., in just a decade or so, JUST from working hard ... so yes, many 'poor' people get richer every single day. Sometimes rich people do become poor too, in fact it happens more often than people care to admit, because we're not supposed to feel sorry for rich people. What communist silliness.
BTW many poor people don't use electric stoves, they use paraffin etc.
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