If only our politicians could learn that when they’ve solved a problem, they should look for the next one to solve
There’s an app many of you haven’t heard of lately. Out of the wet coal, diesel soaked ashes of Eskom came the app that capitalised on our energy provider’s failures.
With a schedule more complicated than a private school’s nine-day rotation, somebody had to make sense of load shedding and a 30% matric wasn’t going to do the trick. Enter EskomSePush or ESP for those who find satire vulgar.
An app that solved a problem and shifted
Pretty much like any innovation, it addressed a problem. In this case, the problem was not knowing when the power would be off. Nobody expected EskomSePush to start generating electricity but it still gave us something useful. And as long as the power kept cutting out, people had a reason for keeping the app.
If anybody had an incentive for the lights to keep going off, it would be them. What good would the app that tells you when the power is being cut be when the power doesn’t get cut?
Did they delay Medupi? Did they blow transformers in distributions boxes? Did they do anything to give effect to their incentive to keep the grid unstable? No. To the corrupt and foolish, it would seem a foolish thing to do. But if sabotage isn’t in your repertoire, you’re not about to plunge 60 million people into darkness just so you can keep your app relevant.
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So, they shifted, changed, used the community they built and offered a similar proposition but to address different, more localised problems. Now when there’s a power outage or your local municipality hasn’t dumped enough sugar in your water, you know exactly what app you’re opening to complain. Then once you close Facebook, you’ll check ESP to find out if your neighbours are facing the same difficulties or if you just need to buy more credit.
Politicians don’t look for problems to solve
It seems simple because at its root, is a simple concept – when the problem you’ve formed to solve goes away, look for another problem to solve.
Not with our politicians. We’re still pumped on the revolution. There’s no wonder that we don’t really do much more than pay lip service to fighting corruption since we’re still convinced that we’re fighting apartheid. Sure, the pre-94 legacy lingers in many respects and I find it astonishing that very few of the interventions over 30 years have yielded proportionately good results, but can we also look at the other problems of today?
It’s great that houses are being built and that water is being delivered to poor communities. We can discuss the quality of that water another time. What we need to discuss now is whether there’s going to be innovation in solving South Africa’s other growing problems or if we’re cool with building some schools and hosting a summit.
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I’m not being entirely fair. There are some governmental successes for 2025. We got off the greylist that we were thrown into. We have job growth which is nice since we have the lowest employment figures of the G20. Inflation is somewhat under control now that everything is so expensive. Oh and the rand is apparently doing quite well, hitting levels we haven’t seen since 2022.
Those would be nice things to think about if we can ignore that we’re pulling ourselves out the hole our leadership threw us into in the first place.
Instead of showing some innovation and building on the successes, we have this habit of yo-yoing between bad and less bad, and then accept it because it seems like improvement.
We have a great country. Instead of doing the minimum so that we can keep doing something, let’s solve some things so that we can move onto the next things to solve. I may be mistaken but that seems like a far more attractive revolution.
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