OUT TO LUNCH
If you had the misfortune to live in South Africa these past few weeks you probably wouldn’t have had a clue that your enemy was not a hostile external country but employees of Eskom, the country’s electricity supplier. It says much for South Africa that we can save any potential invading force an enormous amount of trouble by destroying our own country.
And so it was that, as many sat in cold and darkness during the four hour plus Stage 6 loadshedding, many disgruntled employees of Eskom were dragging fellow female employees from their cars on the way to the Camden Power Station, threatening others with clubs, stones and petrol bombs and allegedly threatening to fire-bomb the homes of any Eskom employees who turned up for work. This was all possible thanks to the usual minimal police presence while the ‘Prat in the Hat’ was grabbing some publicity down in East London at a very sad pre-existing crime scene.
Some rather sophisticated sabotage was also taking place as Dirk Hermann, CEO of trade union Solidarity described to the City Press.
“They break the small glass panel in a gearbox through which the oil level’s checked. The oil then drains out slowly and, 10 or 12 hours later, the system trips. They close the supply of cooling water so that a boiler, pump or system overheats and they remove the pyrometers that measure the heat of the fire in the giant boilers, so that the unit trips. These are put back later, so no one knows what the cause was.”
Rather unsurprisingly, other union leaders deny that their members are responsible for sabotage despite 90% of union members at three Mpumalanga power stations ignoring their leader’s calls to return to work. With that sort of internal discipline why on earth would we believe anything NUMSA has to say on the matter?