Humour: The South African contradiction: Fast cars and power cuts

I’m still in the biggest city in Africa, Johannesburg. This is a sprawling city with over ten million people residing within its environs. If they say, Rwanda is a country of a thousand hills; Johannesburg is a city of a million cars. At the moment, we are experiencing severe power cuts, the likes of which were happening at home way back in the year 2004 when power load shedding was at its highest. Do you remember how they used to ‘cut’ the power for the greater part of the evening? In Jo’burg, the cuts are worse than anything we experienced then. Traffic jams stretch for miles without end. Imagine, with most traffic electronically controlled by robots (traffic lights), once the power is off, the traffic flow comes to a grinding halt. At the moment, the President of South Africa, his excellence Comrade Mbeki is locked in a marathon of meetings with the “Milenge John”, the head of German electricity company Escom, in a bid to defuse the electricity crisis. Everybody is busy making noise over the electricity load shedding being experienced here. Just the other day, we got stuck in traffic jam because the robots were not working; a journey that normally takes twenty or thirty minutes took over an hour. Not withstanding the electricity interruptions, without fear or favour, I can declare that, this place is much more developed than so many European countries. Take for example Portugal or Spain; they do not begin to compare with South Africa. I suppose, the African-ness of South Africa only lies in its name. How else do you explain the quantity and quality of European cars on the roads here? The guys are now driving the 2008 models of all the popular car brands like, BMW, VW, Audi, Mercedes, Range & Land Rovers, Jaguars (not the bus though), Lamborghini, VOLVO, Austin, Toyota, Nissan, Isuzu, MAZDA, Ford, etc, all manufactured in South Africa! It is quite incredible to find more German car brands in Jo’burg than on the streets of Hamburg, Stuttgart or Hanover, but here they are, all locally made. I suppose, these guys just hit their ‘Vision Vingt Vingt’ fifty or so years ago. Oops, the bloody power cut has caught me, I have to go, I will be giving you more when the power comes back. I can hear the UPS on this computer crying out for freedom. CIAO. E-mail: mfashumwana@fastmail.fm