Extract Our world, our southern hemisphere world, has experienced darkness on levels both prosaic and unimaginable. We’ve gone to hell in a hand basket a man in the grocery store said, and he was right.
We’ve experienced:
- Darkness of the soul in the senseless racially motivated murder of Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand. The death toll was a staggering 50 people, murdered by hate and religious typecasting and intolerance.
- Darkness of the heart as Mozambican Cyclone Idai caused the worst humanitarian disaster the southern hemisphere has ever seen, affecting three countries: Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Thousands were killed, many thousands more displaced. At least 90% of Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, Beira, was flattened.
- Just plain old-fashioned powerlessness for South Africans as Eskom plunged South Africans into the dark when they implemented rolling blackouts, causing huge disruption and chaos across our country.
It’s all we South Africans can think about or talk about. Load-shedding has become a conversation starter: What about load-shedding do you mind the most?
The lights going out …
- Just as you’ve switched on a fully loaded washing machine?
- When you’ve just closed the lift doors and begun the slow descent to the ground floor only to hear the cable grind to a halt mid floor;
- When you’re in the middle of your favourite television programme and there’s nothing but four hours of darkness and boredom ahead because its only 8pm and the lights are due to come back on at midnight;
- As you’re falling asleep and the industrial generator at the hotel across the road from your apartment kicks in and is so loud that you say goodnight to rest;
- When your phone battery dies, and you need to make an urgent call;
- When, in your favourite generator-free coffee shop, you have to forego your morning cappuccino or café latte or macchiato. It’s enough to make a grown woman weep!
Still, there are more pressing concerns, like that of someone with emphysema whose life depends on an electricity-fuelled oxygen tank to keep alive; or a mother whose son is in his matric year whose worry is that he has no access to his computer for revision purposes or to complete assignments for a considerable part of his study day.
As long as is the endless irritation list — even as we count the cost of this ridiculous predicament the power utility has got us in — in a fortnight of unbelievable human suffering, we could be accused of over-reacting to something as trifling as a few uncomfortable hours without power.
Everyone will agree that load-shedding — most of us have endured stage 4 (some say stage 5, even 6!) in recent weeks — is disruptive.
Eskom says the frequency and duration of load-shedding increases as higher stages are used.
· Stage 1 requires the least amount of load-shedding, three times over a four-day period for two hours at a time, or three times over an eight-day period for four hours at a time.
· Stage 2 will double the frequency of stage 1, which means you will be scheduled for load-shedding six times over a four-day period for two hours at a time, or six times over an eight-day period for four hours at a time
· Stage 3 will increase the frequency of stage 2 by 50%, which means you will be scheduled for load-shedding nine times over a four-day period for two hours at a time, or nine times over an eight-day period for four hours at a time.
· Stage 4 will double the frequency of stage 2, which means you will be scheduled for load-shedding 12 times over a four-day period for two hours at a time, or 12 times over an eight-day period for four hours at a time.
· Increasing frequency and duration during stages 5-8.
· National blackout!
— KNOW YOUR LOAD-SHEDDING:
A friend complained loudly: “It’s that bloody Cyclone Idai in Mozambique! There was severe damage when it knocked down pylons and that, I’ve heard, affected the power supply to Eskom, Aaaagh.”
She was (quite rightly) chastised by a wizened old woman — a humanitarian aid worker until her retirement five years ago — and told to get her priorities right.
The rolling blackouts were, she said, a mere inconvenience, especially when judged against the death of more than a dozen people she knew from impoverished villages in Mozambique’s Sofala province.
She’d been there during the catastrophic 2000 Mozambique flood that saw the death of more than 700 people. During that horrific natural disaster, 20,000 herd of cattle were lost, arable land was drowned, and tens of thousands of people were left homeless. The weather, the aid worker said, was relentless. The country was lashed with driving rain for a full five full weeks, making rescue missions impossible and getting help to far-flung villages a nightmare.
But the incidence of utter devastation and horror in 2000 has paled into insignificance when compared to the destructive power of Cyclone Idai.
When Idai made landfall near the now decimated port city Beira, with winds of around 180km/h, it triggered a disaster of massive proportion that has, it is estimated by UN workers on the ground, affected millions of people.
Described as a humanitarian disaster of great proportion by Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi — more than 1,000 people have been killed in his country.
Taking it one step further, a UN weather agency spokesperson told the BBC that this was shaping up to be “one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to his the southern hemisphere”.
The television images are horrific: long lines of dispossessed homeless people with babies tied on their mothers’ backs, and home made wooden carts carrying paltry domestic possessions, with women carrying cages of live chickens on their heads, all trudging through mud and debris — dead-eyed — to get to safety.
The number of people affected in all three countries is alarmingly high. Yes, the world mourns, but death and destruction caused by a natural disaster is fatalistic at best.
Not so a terrorist mass shooting that is inspired only by hate. Not so the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre — in which a right-wing white supremacist wittingly killed 50 Muslims at prayer in two mosques.
As Zimbabweans and Malawians and Mozambicans rally to help those affected by the cyclone, as the international community gathers to co-ordinate the massive disaster relief programme that will, in time, help rebuild the broken countries, so too do Antipodeans stop to count their dead, to recount the horror of the murder of people at prayer and to wonder at the senselessness of it all.
The man in the grocery store was right. We’ve gone to hell in a hand basket. And I’m not sure when, if, we’re coming back.
Meanwhile, we’re still in the dark.
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