Forget Stockholm syndrome — we are all victims of Eskom syndrome — the parastatal has captured our speak

When we use Eskom’s euphemistic technical statement “load shedding” in our everyday language, we are active agents of its spin. Our word-of-mouth endorsement of its institutional failure is probably its greatest public relations coup. Yes, Eskom has captured our speak.

It is, on many levels, a capture campaign that has been under way for decades at the highest political, governance and senior management levels.

We are all angered and frustrated — but somehow, we all have our “load shedding” conversation daily to adapt our lives and working schedules to Eskom’s incompetence. We schedule our lives around Eskom’s stages of failure. The phrase “load shedding” diminishes the crisis. It co-opts us all into some national movement to rotate the load — like good neighbours.

Surprisingly, some media platforms repeat Eskom’s corporate spin by using “load shedding” quite generously in their reporting. While load shedding rightly describes temporary relief on an overextended generator, for example, what Eskom has managed to do is turn the phrase into a long-term national project and communications campaign.  

There are some children, now at high school, who were born by hospital generator. Load shedding is their “normal”.  

It is not scheduled load shedding. It’s rolling blackouts. It’s power cuts. It’s a power supply failure.

This power crisis, especially during this Covid-19 economy, is about a failure of political will and governance. It’s a failure of leadership. A failure of transparent financial management. A failure of execution.

This national failure is exhibited, daily, in every electrified home and business. It’s the most in-your-face theft of a public entity in recent history. And we have adopted the perpetrator’s language.    

But flip the context: if you and I fail to deliver the production goals or profitability for the company, we don’t get to describe this as profit-shedding. Or competence-shedding.

If you and I take bribes, shirk our fiduciary duties as directors and hand contracts to friends, we don’t get to call a press conference and label it integrity-shedding.

If you and I fail to pay the tax due, we could be criminally charged. We don’t get to call it tax-shedding in court.

Circa 1961, Hendrik Verwoerd, with a patronising smirk on his face, famously proposed some classic spin: “Our policy is… called… Apartheid. It could just as easily, and perhaps much better, be described as a policy of good neighbourliness.”

Had Verwoerd’s National Party had the same PR agency that Eskom has, the Anti-Apartheid Movement might have been known as the “Anti-Good Neighbourliness Movement”. But we didn’t buy the NP’s bullsh*t, did we?  

Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki and Kathrada made sure of that. They called it as they saw it.

We ordinary citizens must call a spade a spade. Call incompetence, incompetence. Call corruption, corruption. Call theft, theft. Let’s start by calling a blackout, a blackout.

As citizens, let’s say it like it is, in all matters of public interest.

Until we are all conscious activists, in our own ways, we will cede control to those who seek to serve themselves.

Let’s speak our own speak.  Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll get the real change we deserve in our country. DM