Our entitlement culture
This post follows on from what I touched on in terms of my previous post regarding our Africa Victim mentality of yesterday. While driving home last evening I managed to catch a discussion on 567 Talk Radio that was being facilitated by John Maytham who I rate as one of the most intelligent radio hosts on the waves currently. The discussion centred around the Eskom power failures and John was doing his best to show us how we all need to take some role in saving power and getting through this crisis together. I was, and you could sense from his voice, amazed at the attitude of the bulk of the listeners. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that “we are not to blame and we need to see some action taken against the culprit Eskom” (and their leaders). While I agree that this has been gross mismanagement, lets face the facts that the power issues are going to be around for sometime. We need to work individually and collectively on finding innovative solutions to the problem. We need to take up some of the challenges posed on a daily basis in terms of saving energy. The net effect of our individual and collaborative efforts will be to save power, thereby reducing the demand and effectively removing the risk of rolling blackouts. I was challenged by the Maytham household who John claims using less than 600kw hours of power per month for a family of four. I have not discussed this with my better half yet, but we will certainly be trying to take up this challenge. I would urge all of you to do this same.