[The slow slide of incompetance, and mismanagement is starting to rear its head… as we enter the 11th year after Apartheid. We said it would happen… but as usual nobody listens to us.

Let me describe some simple daily observations: It is amazing how often traffic lights or lamp posts aren’t functioning. Though I must admit, I have seen many lamp posts with their lights on all day long! On my way to work this morning… which is a short 20 Km drive… I went through 3 sets of traffic lights which weren’t working. I hardly ever go to work and see all the traffic lights functioning.

Sometimes… people are so used to lights not functioning that I observed a few days ago… at a major traffic intersection how several cars decided to cross a RED LIGHT… which had been red for some minutes… even as cars were coming in the direction which was green. I have seen this happen many times… cars just driving across a red traffic light… even when the light is still red. They wait and wait and when it doesn’t change to green they just go. Maybe the light’s timing is out… or they suspect its broken (when it isn’t) and then they just drive anyway… But the incident the other day was quite frightening because several cars just started going one after another.

At night… because of crime… many people do not stop at traffic lights… Then you get people who drive through red traffic lights at high speed, never even slowing down or stopping to check.

I must digress… I know an American… who lives here. He told me that he *NEVER* drives around at night in South Africa!!! … and he comes from Los Angeles!! He is so frightened of crime!!!

I’m not even going to tell you about my electricity billing problems… I am curious why my electricity bill suddenly took a big jump for no apparent reason…

Another bizarre thing has been a story that the Johannesburg municipality has no money for petrol for their lawn mowers!! Yes… I discovered this… when I realised they had only mowed the public lawns in my suburb once this entire summer… Now there is grass 4 feet high where there should be lawns. Then a friend told me it has been reported in various suburban newspapers that they do not have money to pay for the petrol of the lawnmowers…!

Read this horrific story from a friend of mine, about how officials deal with people regarding electrical power. She wrote:-
“Just be VERY careful Janour neighbour got TOLD straight out by one of the city managers that he lives in an œaffluent area and was noted as a regular payer. So when he got an extra R6000 [$1,100] on his [electricity] account one month and queried it, they said, yip we don™t care whether it™s a mistake or not, you can afford to pay more than you (really) owe because we need the money for the underdeveloped areas!!!!!! He took them to court and was awarded damages of over R50,000 for food in the freezer which rotted and loss of income from his home office when they disconnected his power when he refused to pay the incorrect account. They keep tabs on you and when they are in the crunch, they just slap you with a huge account to recover their bad debts in other areas!

A rotten bunch indeed.”

Note her reference to “recover bad debt in other areas” – Blacks can get away without paying their water, lights or telephone bills… But let us try… and we’ll be hauled off to court in a jiffy. It is a well-known fact – publicised many times – of enormous sums of bad debt which is written off because millions of SOWETO residents decide heck – they’re not paying their bills. These bad debts are written off every now and then… And the rest of us… have to pay indirectly for everyone.

Here is another example of how our infrastructure is badly managed or deteriorating:-

In the 9-storey building I work in, in the centre of Johannesburg, we suddenly got incredible power surges some days ago. They had to cut off the power because of these incredibly high voltages coming in – which were creating an incredible heat in the basement. The whole building lost power and we’ve been running on its generators for days now while they try to fix the equipment damaged inside the building by the power surges and try to find out why the incoming electricity has been behaving so strangely.

Some years ago… I knew a man who worked for the Rand Water Board, who told me how rusted and leaking the pipes were which were supplying power to Johannesburg. He used to inspect the pipes and he told me that the pipes were in a terrible condition but there was no money to replace them. He used to inspect pipes which were about 10 feet in diameter which supply water to the city from hundreds of miles away.

Here is a story from the Business Day about Johannesburg’s electrical problems:-

Joburg needs R800m to end power plague

Government is considering a once-off major capital injection into Johannesburg’s dilapidated electricity infrastructure, which has been plagued by escalating blackouts.

The city experienced a series of outages over the festive season, affecting businesses mainly restaurants negatively.

The minerals and energy department’s chief director of electricity Ompi Aphane said yesterday talks between his department, national treasury and the provincial and local government department were taking place to deal with the issue.

He said he hoped that an initiative would be launched this year, but cautioned that there were many competing claims on the national budget and that the project would have to be evaluated alongside other priorities.

Aphane said after a briefing to Parliament’s minerals and energy affairs committee yesterday that a minimum, once-off sum of R800 million was needed to invest in electricity infrastructure in Johannesburg to stop the blackouts.

Power failures in the country’s industrial heartland were a source of great concern to government, he said, because of their economic effect and threat to investment.

A department study found that Johannesburg would need R2 billion over five years as a “first prize”, but a minimum R800 million once-off investment would get the electricity network to the right level.

To deal with the problem in all of the big metros would cost R3-4 billion, Aphane said.

Johannesburg’s problem was the most serious as its network was very old and supplied major industries.

Aphane said the blackouts in Gauteng were caused by a lack of investment in electricity networks, and not by demand-supply disparities of the kind that lay behind ongoing electricity failures experienced in California after it privatised its electricity networks.

A percentage of the electricity tariff paid by consumers was meant to be used for maintenance, but municipalities used this money for their other services instead, he said.

The municipalities claimed that the money allocated them by national government each year from the national budget was not enough for them to perform their functions.

Aphane said that national government could not force local governments to invest in their infrastructure, because they were constitutionally independent.

Comments made repeatedly by Aphane during his briefing suggested the constitutionally entrenched independence of local government was seen by the minerals and energy department as an obstacle to the effective implementation of government policies in many areas.

Aphane said a co-operative approach would have to be adopted to sort out the blackout problem.

A capital grant was required, as tariff-generated investment income would take too long to accrue.

African National Congress MP Ismail Mohamed was critical about “all the passing of the buck” over the blackout problem.

Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa blamed Eskom, and antiquated equipment inherited from the apartheid regime was also cited as a cause.

But, Mohamed said, municipalities should have invested in maintenance a long time ago.

Source: Business Day
URL: http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3…/p>