Pay your electricity bills, it’ll save SA

● Employees of Joburg’s City Power came under attack recently while on a campaign to disconnect illegal electricity connections and demand payment from non-paying customers in Alexandra township.

Before this incident the entity’s officials were attacked by residents of a block of flats when enforcing similar compliance in Hillbrow. Missiles were thrown from balconies, making it impossible for the officials to do their work.

According to reports in one newspaper, in Alexandra only 4% of residents pay for their electricity and among those visited by City Power officials was a service station owing the utility nearly R1m. The diplomatic mission of a West African country was said to owe nearly R500,000.

Last year, Tshwane officials went on a similar campaign to collect debts from defaulting residents, hotels and embassies, among other things, including posh security estates. According to reports, Soweto owed Eskom about R5bn as of September last year despite a significant debt write-off. This is just a tiny part of the story. Very little is publicly known about the real state of affairs in many towns and cities. However, it is publicly known that Eskom is owed billions by municipalities and the utility is suffocating in a R400bn debt that retards many of its operational requirements, including critical maintenance.

The energy regulator recently granted permission for the company to hike its tariffs to deal with this meltdown.

The situation points to two important challenges facing us as society. First, entitlement requires attention as a matter of urgency if we are to enhance our chances of getting things right and building the kind of future we want.

If there is one lesson from the Eskom saga it is that building institutions in society is not an outcome of luck or accident. It is a deliberate effort and it is the duty of all stakeholders to play their part, however small. Permanently withdrawing or sucking gratification without putting in anything in return is a sure recipe for disaster, and using electricity, including for business, without paying for it is parasitic. It is the same with municipalities where residents demand services but refuse to pay, placing them in the difficult position of being nothing more than salary-paying entities for their lucky employees.

Second, the situation signals how we are descending into lawlessness. It is frightening to see government officials attacked while they are carrying out their duties to enforce compliance.

But we see this lawlessness in other areas, such as when truck drivers blockade a national road for no clear reason. We have seen it in the torching of buses in the Western Cape when taxi drivers go on strike, resulting in children from poor areas not making it to school. We see it in the vandalism and theft of critical infrastructure in our public hospitals, exposing sick and dying patients to risk.

We saw the xenophobic version of this lawlessness when members of a certain civil movement went on the rampage in Springs, beating up foreign nationals they accused of drugdealing, while others in different parts of Gauteng prevented sick patients from accessing health care because they were said to be in the country illegally. We also see it in violent service-delivery protests where motorists are pelted with stones and emergency vehicles and personnel prevented from doing their work, including accessing hospitals and saving lives.

Urgent infrastructure projects are not being delivered because of this culture of lawlessness as bullies muscle in for a “share”.

We face a desperate situation in which lawlessness is becoming a way of life. It is time to initiate nationwide public education campaigns to deal with this problem. Social behaviour-change communication has been used in various parts of the world to drive social change, notably in areas of health and crime, and we have to seriously look into this option to get us out of this situation.

Another option of course is to do nothing and just hope the problem will miraculously go away, or expect our police to deal with it when we already know that they are barely coping. We saw for instance in a video recently an officer watching helplessly as members of Dudula went on their campaign to rid Ekurhuleni of its drug problem by rounding up illegal immigrants.

Embarking on a social behaviour re-engineering campaign is by no means a call for citizens to suddenly forget about their problems and frustrations with the government or a call to apply a glamorous lipstick of deception to serious governance and service-delivery shortcomings. Citizens should still call out these failures, but this has to be done in a decent way that does not threaten our collective future as a stable society.

No country can build a future when lawlessness is allowed to thrive and anarchy becomes normalised. Haiti is going through a very difficult humanitarian situation with gangs doing as they please after the collapse of law and order, reducing the government to a helpless spectator as the orgy of violence unfolds. The collapse was preceded by a set of events and the emergence of a dangerous culture that government leaders chose to ignore.

We risk becoming a nation no investor will want to do business with, and it is in our collective interest to build a local and global reputation for a common future.