[DEBATE] : Power for the people must be state priority, , Editorial,

[Dominic Tweedie]

Let me stick this here, out from under Patrick's huge message of
stats. I really need to get it off my chest. Here goes:

Barry Sergeant began: "Something truly catastrophic has happened at
Eskom" and that is the right place to begin, not with alleged
requisitions for power stations refused a decade ago, as COSATU has
done following TM's dramatic "confession".

Obviously there is a supply side and a demand side and the guys at
Eskom can see it all yet they ran us into the buffers at full speed.

They even increased the speed as Patrick said by selling huge amounts
of power dirt cheap on long-term fixed-price contracts to big corpos,
with no benefit to the country.

The catastrophe that Sergeant is referring to is not the blackout one
that we see every day happening in our homes, streets and workplaces.
It is the huge human-factor management failure. Is there a Captain
Queeg up there? Is there a Milo Minderbinder up there? Some even worse
kind of monster? A drunk? A drug addict? Emperor Nero? The Manson
family? What the four-X is going on?

At least Barry Sergeant has set the right gonzo tone for a gonzo event
which is so far being treated as just a bit unfortunate and brace up
chaps, we'll all have to be a bit frugal for the next seven years.

Meanwhile we leave the whole caboosh in the same hands, the hands of
Queeg/Minderbinder/Manson/Nero! What can people be thinking of? How
many people are thinking at all? How long before the penny drops?

What we need is a total audit of the supply side and the demand side
in detail in Kilowatts, all the backward and forward projections, and
a total audit of the human factor, too. Heads must roll and we must
have total transparency and democratic control of all forward
decision-making, and especially when it comes to new contracts for
sale of power or of purchase of power stations.

This thing stinks to high heaven.

Dominic


On 20/01/2008, Riaz K Tayob <riazt at iafrica.com> wrote:
> I am not sure but look at the Trade Industry Policy (TIPs) research documents and Ebrahim Khalil Hassen's NALEDI paper as I seem to recall some references.

-- 
Blog at: http://domza.blogspot.com/
Communist University web site at: http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/
Subscribe for free e-mail updates at:
http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University/
Library of documents (CU "CD") at: http://cu.domza.net/
dominic.tweedie at gmail.com