The price of power

Amidst these times of negotiating on a power sharing deal in Zimbabwe, you may think that this post is on politics. But it's not.. not really anyway. And the again - maybe it is.

Well, the post is on electricity. On service delivery - and the lack thereof.

Today (Saturday 18th October) at 8 PM it will be exactly 21 days - or three weeks since I found myself cooking meatballs in complete darkness. There was a power cut. And until this day the power hasn't returned.

I've been relying on electricity from a dodgy generator (to say the least) and that has kept me in darkness for the past nine out of ten days and the bill for trying to get the generator running properly is now approaching 500 USD. The fact that the generator hasn't been working most of the time of course means that I didn't spent a lot of diesel, which would have set me back app. 26 USD every three days.

Now in the mean time the residents of my frustrated neighborhood met last week with the power company ZESA to try and find out what the problem is and how it can be solved (in Harare/Zimbabwe electricity is simply refered to as ZESA [Caesar] - i.e. "We haven't had ZESA for three weeks"). 

Apparently two transformers (don't know exactly what they do, but they seem to be important) burned and ZESA doesn't have the money to replace them. Each transformer costs somewhere in the vicinity of 10.000 USD.

Yesterday I received an 'invitation' for another meeting for residents on Monday. The purpose of the meeting is to find out how many residents are willing to donate money to ZESA to buy two new transformers. 

In other words: on top of the money one would pay for the electricity provided, which should cover costs of maintenance, we would have to pay 300 USD because ZESA is more or less broke.

Now as a matter of principle I would never pay that money - but on the other hand, I'm getting  desperate for power. My refrigerator has nothing but warm beer in it, my electrical gate doesn't work, I haven't been able to watch TV for three weeks, most of the time I can't get water from my borehole (depends on electricity), the alarm system for the whole property is off, I can't use my computer at home etc etc. 

But my selfish needs seem to count less when I think of the fact that the reason for ZESA being broke is essentially political. Those in power for the past 28 years have managed to ruin the country and all institutions in it - so that basic maintenance - and hence service delivery - is now being neglected. 

Now I could get the means to pay to keep ZESA going, but should I, when the governement seems to be utterly indifferent? Furthermore I happen to live in a wealthy neighborhood where (most) people can actually afford to pay 300 USD to satisfy their own needs for electricity - even though it may not seem fair. But for the vast majority of people in Zimbabwe 300 USD is an enormous amount of money, which they would never be able to pay. 

So if I and the rest of the residents in my neighborhood pay for the transformers, wouldn't we be helping a corrupt and abusive government to cement its position that everything in Zimbabwe is fine...?