Apps are extensions of your normal. It's psychologically impossible to solve loadshedding while accommodating it. Rather be inconvenienced and rage against the dying of the light, writes Siya Khumalo.
Facebook posts and online articles claim that smartphones don't appear in our dreams.
This makes sense: do we normally watch TV shows about our TV sets or read books detailing how books are put together? Then why should we expect to dream about our brains and minds? Our phones are arguably extensions of our minds because it has calculators, maps, translation services and contacts built into it. That's why we don't dream about it anymore than fish dream about the colour of the water they swim in.
Why would you want an accommodation to loadshedding in that space?
Sometimes the app jumps you a block without warning, or loadshedding starts sooner and ends later than the app said.
So not only is power supply unreliable, but the communication mechanism for letting you know that is likewise unreliable. The people who designed those apps and schedules would have been more honest if they'd designed get-away cars for robbers. At any rate, here are my other reasons:
1) Where are the arrests?
The Zondo Commission is a test of the prima facie case that the Gupta family "captured" a network that worked as an undemocratic state undermining the rule of law. At the heart of this capture was policy, hiring and procurement decisions that have set energy security back decades. Until meaningful arrests are made about this, you shouldn't accommodate loadshedding apps without compensation through a tax rebate for the download data, the device storage space, and work time lost. Heed Dylan Thomas when he says to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light'.
2) It's been several years
When people went without power for almost 100 consecutive hours over Christmas during lockdown (contrary to political promises), I realised what restaurant kitchens and hospital emergency rooms have in common: the people working in it never know what they'll be expected to deal with next.
It could be a meal order for which they're missing one ingredient they took for granted that they had stock of, or a stab victim still being pursued by their assailant. It's different each time, and you don't know exactly which entry point you need to station security at ahead of time for something like that. But Eskom can put one challenge on its desk tomorrow morning and solve it with only more political will: how to meet 101% of the country's power needs. A hospital can't meet the same kind of target without first making a longer list of resources it'd need to achieve that (or being very resourceful and creative with the resources it has).
There isn't a different kind of electricity for running your television from the kind you use to run your business, only a different quantity. Our state-owned enterprises are being bailed out for shoddy procurement choices, while the guilty are given psychotherapy and unburdening sessions passed off as commissions of enquiry (the difference being meaningful arrests) at taxpayers' expense.
When you order a pizza from some entrepreneur working their guts out, you choose the thickness of the base you want, or whether you need cutlery. They know you can buy your food somewhere else if you aren't pleased. But Eskom tells you about the same bland loadshedding as yesteryear and you accept it: to download the loadshedding app is to accept this challenge as a permanent feature of our existence.
3) The compounded cost
Have you thrown food out of your fridge because loadshedding continued longer than expected? Have you had appliances go out of commission, or lost hours' worth of work because you lost track of time? Wasn't the price of food jacked up because power is a cost passed on by retailers, agriprocessors, container makers, graphic designers and many other value chain players that use electricity to bring food to us?
4) The inconvenience of not having an app is justified by the principle
Rather get caught unprepared for Zoom meetings scheduled during loadshedding periods and text the people you're working with to say you're on a hunger strike from convenience until this nuisance is solved. Vegans inconvenience everyone they visit for their principles; please let's learn a lesson from them. If a critical mass of people puts pressure on business chambers and municipalities, it'll accelerate change in the right direction. If, on the other hand, you learn to work around loadshedding, you won't be as hungry for the solution.
5) The laws of physics imply that if you don't reject loadshedding now, you never will
Now is the only moment in which you define yourself and what you'll accept: why do you want to find out what'll make you make a different choice tomorrow? Consider thermodynamics and mechanics physics, as well as how they suggest that it'll be psychologically impossible for you to change your standards tomorrow unless you decide to change them today or are pushed by a severe inconvenience tomorrow.
From the first law of thermodynamics we infer that a change in your mental state can't be created or destroyed in an isolated system. In other words, you won't draw a line in the sand until you suffer a loss you can't afford. That you’re willing to take those bets means you're okay with experiencing the same problem on repeat. It's now or never.
From the second thermodynamics law, we infer that your willpower and standards will undergo entropy — that is, weaken as you age. "Use it or lose it." Your mind acclimates just as a frog's body adjusts to the heat in a pot of water that's being brought to a boil. You're a product of your environment because you tolerate the environment and must trick or force yourself to experience it as more inconvenient than it truly is to change it.
From the third thermodynamics law, we learn that the longer you tolerate something, the more likely you are to remain in it.
Or consider Sir Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion: Everything does what it's doing until something else acts on it. No one in the world will rescue South Africa as long as South Africans have apps to make their circumstances manageable. The app doesn't administer a solution; it offers a pacifier.
The second law of motion says force is the product of mass and acceleration. By itself, this says nothing. But if you remember that momentum is force times time, you'll see that a situation, given time, gains momentum such that the number of "now" moments in which you defined yourself as okay with it gets exceeded by the number of "now" moments of making the opposite decision (or expending more personal energy than you've ever expended at a time) to undo the status quo.
The third law tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The less said about the political implications of this, the better.
6) Metaphysical lessons extend the previous insights
You block people you should never hear from again, even if you crave what you know to be a toxic connection. That's why the Bible says, "Make no provision for the flesh" while also saying, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak".
Folk wisdom says if you give the devil an inch he'll take a mile. Having perhaps escaped many miles, Lot's wife only had to turn once to be turned into a pillar of salt. She’d barely retraced a single step.
Leadership coaches say to "burn your boats", meaning cut off the possibility of retreat. If your Sodom and Gomorrah are burning, there's nothing to look back on.
Push notifications means citizens haven't burned their loadshedding bridges. May this bridge burned light your way because Eskom won't.
- Siya Khumalo is the author of You Have To Be Gay To Know God (2018). He is also a Mr Gay South Africa runner-up and Mr Gay World Top 10 finalist.
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