Someone, anyone, please manage the load shedding chaos

Chain stores in neighbourhood shopping centres are dark, filled with staff who’ve locked themselves in (clearly this is some sort of “procedure” dictated by head office). And suburbs which aren’t supposed to be without power are, due to “faults”. No one knows when the power is coming back on. No one even knows what stage Eskom is on, given the constant flip-flopping.

Take a look around you in this mess. There are quite literally billions and billions of rands being wasted. Someone like economist Mike Schüssler would be able to quantify it with a few minutes work.

The millions of man-hours evaporating because it takes two hours to complete a (normally) 20 minute journey. Retail outlets that simply can’t trade. Factories which can’t plan production shifts because Eskom’s plan to undertake load shedding is unpredictable (and because the municipal schedules are even more so!).

It does not have to be this way!

Let’s start with accepting our fate. We have to get used to the constant rotating outages. It will be part of our daily routine for a few more years yet.

Now, government seems intent on planning centrally, so why doesn’t it?

We’re told that Eskom is being run by a “war room”. That seemingly extends to everything from communication these days, to the actual day-to-day crisis it’s trying to manage. (Based on this, it evidently doesn’t need a CEO or an Executive head of Generation, but I digress.)

So, we have a war room. But there’s very little evidence of coordination beyond that.

Thing is, we’re not bad at planning and delivering … when we put our minds to it. With a strong local organising committee, we hosted a globally-acclaimed 2010 FIFA World Cup (and no, keeping the lights on then did not get us into this current Eskom mess). The period of mourning for President Nelson Mandela was another massive logistical undertaking which ran without any major hiccups.

Use the 2010 LOC as a blue print, and set up a crisis committee/council/whatever you’d like to name it. This group will meet daily, and following that meeting there will be a media briefing. If there’s nothing to report on a given day, then tell South Africa that.

Use this daily meeting to properly coordinate between national government, provincial government and the large metros. This committee can help the metros (and their entities like City Power) manage the situation better.

Predict and plan for a prolonged period of load shedding. I pleaded for this last Wednesday, but I think many readers thought I was joking. I’m not. Assume that we will run at stage two load shedding every day until at least May. If generators return to service unexpectedly, do not flop back to stage one.

We should not have to wake up each day anew and wonder what the day will bring. What will it be today? Stage two? Cue the frantic hunting for schedules on a site that’s buckling under the load (City Power’s, not Eskom’s)… And we certainly don’t need to be treated like imbeciles by whomever’s manning Eskom’s Twitter account.

(Never mind that Twitter should not be the utility’s primary communication mechanism.)

Publish rolling three-week schedules for every single suburb in every single metro (and obviously larger blocks in the cities and towns), and then stick to them. Us citizens (or compatriots to use our President’s terminology) are remarkably good at self-organising – when we know what to expect.

The major media groups are publishing and broadcasting schedules already, leverage that! (And make sure these are alternating schedules, so the same poor souls don’t get sucker-punched every single evening when they get home from work.)

Deploy Metro Police to prevent gridlock. I know the cops will give a long list of reasons why they can’t/aren’t trained/have somewhere else to be. But there’s no logical reason for the lack of pointsmen at major intersections. Start there (start somewhere!). Once that’s working properly, add more people.

This is no longer a “traffic problem”, or an “inconvenience”. Based on what I’ve experienced in Joburg last week, there’s a fundamental breakdown in law and order. Pigspotter (and many others) can back me up on this. If the JMPD and the police in other metros are too short-staffed to ensure that major corridors flow smoothly, deploy the defence force to help.

And this is not a long exercise of finger pointing at government. The private sector has lots of work to do, too.

Switch off the bloody lights of your head office in Sandton/Cape Town/Umhlanga at night! Central business districts are still lit up like Christmas trees. When will this madness end?

If you’d like a name-and-shame list, I’d be more than happy to take a drive one night to escape the darkness at home.

The least the banks can do is roll out battery-operated, wireless card terminals to all their small business clients for free. At least then, the mom-and-pop stores dying in the dark in front of our very eyes can at least be given a fighting shot of battling through the next few years. Don’t the banks want the transactions to keep flowing? Not everyone can spend a few hundred thousand rand on diesel a week to keep a Checkers Hyper open.

My (new) boss floated a left-field idea when we were chatting last week. Why don’t the mobile operators – who are one of the real beneficiaries of all these outages – embrace the situation and pass back data discounts to customers (given the higher (?) volumes)?

We didn’t get quite this far in our conversation, but why can’t Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom Mobile use a mechanism similar to MTN’s ‘Zone’ product to dynamically discount data prices in areas where load shedding is underway. I’m not suggesting that prices drop to 2c a megabyte, but surely they can do something? (Then again, who am I kidding … the cost of keeping base stations online is about to increase fairly dramatically.)

Foreign investors will look upon us more favourably if they can actually see a coordinated response to the situation. They’ll be desperate for certainty. We all are.

In short, we need leadership. Not the kind that an opaque “war room” could give. Real, actual leadership … Someone who takes control of this chaos and starts solving it step-by-step, leaving Eskom to get on with fixing its own mess. If that person doesn’t exist inside Eskom, find him or her. Second someone to that position from business, if need be.

Focus on keeping things as close to normal as possible. We’ve got a long road of this ahead. I’m irritated even typing this because I’m actually not asking for much.

There is a crisis at Eskom (despite what CEO Tshediso Matona thinks or says).

We don’t have to be living in one.

*Hilton Tarrant works at immedia. The article is republished with permission from Moneyweb

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