CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Load-shedding is death knell for SA’s gems too small to be off-grid
The good folk of Paternoster, Riebeek Kasteel and Koringberg, and all those living in small-town SA, are in real trouble because of Eskom
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There was a Facebook post reporting President Cyril Ramaphosa as saying he was shocked by the load-shedding South Africans have had to endure this week.
A smart-Alec apparently came back with this response: you need electricity to be shocked. Yes, it’s funny and the people sitting in the candlelit restaurant in Paternoster, where I was eating cold soup, laughed when someone shared it.
It wasn’t funny though. Never before has the effect of load-shedding on a micro economy been more apparent.
I have been on a round trip through the Swartland, the breadbasket of southern Africa. In Koringberg, the buckle of the wheat belt, the countryside is end-of-summer golden, with the blond sheaves having been cut back and delivered to the silos that dot the countryside. There’s a languorous ebb and flow as people go about their business in a nickel-and-dime economy. In this tiny village, employment is a gift for the few. A friend owns a winery in Koringberg and they are smack-bang in the middle of the harvest. Every day, as the grapes come off the vines, they are transported to the winery. Everywhere are flatbeds laden with bunches of hot grapes, steaming furiously in the sun as they make their way to be processed. There are crushers and pressers and coolers that slow down the fermentation process, ensuring that the grapes ferment slowly. If this process is not followed to the letter, the entire crop could be lost. So load-shedding in the middle of harvest is not only annoying, it’s ...
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