Days+of+mongrel+donkeys,+Barry+Sergeant,+Moneyweb



=Days of mongrel donkeys=


 * Barry Sergeant, “Fear and Loathing”, Moneyweb, Johannesburg, 18 January 2008**

//Something truly catastrophic has happened at Eskom, and it’s going to come out, sooner or later.//

An article from Bloomberg put it like this on Thursday: "South Africa's worst ever power cuts continued for a fourth day, emptying shopping malls, slashing industrial output, forcing restaurants to buy generators and blacking out the nation's main banking district".

This is historic whipsaw stuff. More than 32 000 employees at parastatal Eskom - which supplies 95% of South Africa's electrical power - are mute as paralysing power failures increasingly divide the country into two: the shell-shocked, and the closet dragons. People are taking to the streets, looking for mongrels they can whip for purposes of pure punishment.

The beautiful thing about electrical power is that it either works or it doesn't. South Africa's public sector and parastatal goons have become expert liars in recent years, and no one knows the truth about anything anymore. But Eskom can't lie. It has chosen the mute button instead. Sooner or later, it's going to get whipped, for pure punishment.

The public enterprises minister, Alec Erwin, is mute; Eskom customers can only assume that he's deaf as well, having no doubt already have been badly whipped around the head by a psychotic hospital patient who was carved in two when power failed during major heart surgery. Erwin, a national disgrace, should be forced into immediate retirement with starving troglodytes and subterranean hillbillies looking for good times.

You don't want to try and dumb the nation down when it comes to power supplies. People have ingested dung about everything from local service delivery to job creation, but don't your goons dare lie about electricity. Like an oversexed mongrel donkey, it's going to come back and bite you, and then turn around and kick you in the head as well. Give the people dung, and you get the entire mongrel donkey in return.

This year, the mongrel donkeys are out in huge, drunken packs, storming Eskom sub-stations, rooting like hogs for candles. Eskom chairman Valli Moosa has disappeared like a genie; he has gone more than mute about a non-executive job that only takes him two hours a year but stuffs more than R1m into his bank account - when the power's on, that is. One anecdote has it that Moosa was last seen heading for the Drakensburg Mountains with a herd of savage pack mules hauling solar panels, flares, and bully beef. The mules are going to live off tourists caught in the dark.

Meanwhile, South Africa's atavistic metro police and municipalities have zero plans to relieve gridlocked traffic systems, the spawn of traffic lights paralysed by power outages. All that's needed are solar-driven battery backups, as already used for years in countless other countries.

On Thursday, Buyelwa Sonjica, minister of mines and energy, finally drooped to saying something, possibly an acknowledgment that South Africa is not quite yet a nation of swine. ``Government", her communiqué read, "considers the current level of load shedding in a very serious light and is looking at a number of interventions to ease the situation''.

Is she kidding? Load shedding? This nation of near-swine is not going to accept that kind of filthy jargon. Time for some facts: Eskom epitomises everything that's wrong with this ailing country. Government has overseen the virtual destruction of the country's industrial sector in the past decade. Rolling stock is no longer made here; Denel has imploded; generations of boilermakers have left the country as building of power stations ground to a halt; the Industrial Development Corporation now considers take-away joints and motion pictures to be "industry', and so on.

The human development index (HDI), one of the leading indices in the world, measures a wide framework of what constitutes "well-being". South Africa's HDI has been trend-sliding since 1995, a year after the country went democratic. The latest survey ranks South Africa in position 121, of 177 countries surveyed. South Africa ranks alongside Equatorial Guinea, which has long been a nation of lobotomy-laced swine.


 * From: http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page84?oid=185810&sn=Detail**

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