Ask a Zimbabwean for tips on power cuts

Comment from The Sunday Independent (SA), 20 January: Ask a Zimbabwean for tips on power cuts

What an incredible fuss you South Africans make about a few power cuts. I happened to lie down next to my battery-operated satellite radio for a nap this week after the season's only two hours of summer whacked me out. I heard the likeable David O'Sullivan sounding unlikeable. Okay. He was in a rage, so angry he sounded as though he might burst an artery, or the membrane holding his brain in place. About Eskom. I couldn't believe my ears. As far as I can remember, in this past week there were only about six cuts, and none longer than five hours. Same thing at the pharmacy: moan, moan, moan. Then it struck me - for the first time in my life I had really useful knowledge. I do know about electricity cuts and what to do about them. I know about boilers, paraffin fridges, wicks and lighting the lamps by pumping them hard at 5.30pm.

Please, South African householders, unless you live on more than an acre, don't get a generator. There will be murder in the streets of Parkhurst, the Berea in Durban and Obs in Cape Town if home owners on tiny bits of land all have generators farting rhythmically through long days and dark nights. Even small generators use 1 litre of diesel per hour. And they get stolen easily unless cemented in and you need monster ones to do fridges and stoves. Leave generators to Raymond Ackerman and his ilk. First rule for survival: get a solar panel on the roof, which is connected to an especially large car battery in your house, which is then attached to an inverter, which in turn has a switch that lights up the world. This system keeps a TV, DSTV encoder, DVD player, mobile and laptop chargers going. And it costs nothing to run. The bigger the battery, the more lights. (Ditch desktop computers today.) It doesn't do fridges (more about fridges later) and it doesn't do electric stoves.

Go for gas. Mozambique has 300 years of gas, and the ANC government - even though it chose to do the arms deal instead of electricity - did put in a pipeline for gas from Mozambique. If you live in the older suburbs of Johannesburg phone up the angels (seriously) at eGoli Gas and they will look on the map to see if you have a gas pipe in your street. If you have, then get connected. Gas geysers also work at a fraction of the cost of electricity if you don't go for solar-heated water. Refrigerators are another thing altogether. If you keep the doors shut, a tall one will keep food from going off during a power cut of about 30 hours. A deep freeze lasts about 2,5 days if you don't open it. Longer than that and the food goes off. After all, you can shop daily in South Africa. Raymond Ackerman is going to keep the generators running.

Most Zimbabwe-owned supermarkets shut down during power cuts. Only foreign-connected ones such as Spar have generators, or those owned by Zanu PF chefs (political elite), as they get cheap fuel. You must conserve power. You have a chance to do this because you still do have commerce and industry. We lost our industry over the past few years, so that sector can't really help much. We have more or less given up mining. Except, except, and think about this: your mining houses can buy power with foreign currency directly from Cahora Bassa and pay in US dollars, as they are doing in Zimbabwe now. It is a bit more expensive than Eskom, but it keeps the platinum pouring out. We also don't have any robots left in our streets, and little traffic, so we don't have the kind of traffic jams I saw along Jan Smuts Avenue in Jo'burg on Thursday during a power cut.

We don't kill each other in fuel queues, and we don't have road rage as our roads are mostly gone. Nor do we kill each other in banks, even when there is no money there, or in supermarkets. Well, only very, very occasionally, and only once, over sugar and that was in Bulawayo, which is very far from town. So bear up, improvise and go get the solar, inverter, battery alternatives, and gas. And you will all survive until you have enough new power sources within eight years, so I hear, and you are not going to be nearly as short of foreign currency as Zim, so can import some power. But Zimbabwe will recover sooner than South Africa, because our population is in Hillbrow.