South Africans are not saving enough power, President Thabo Mbeki told a community development workers’ indaba [meeting] in Midrand on Friday.
”I get a sense that we haven’t quite got this message through that it’s a national challenge which requires a response by all South Africans,” he said.
Driving from Pretoria to Johannesburg at night, he saw business premises ablaze with lights.
”There’s nobody there. They leave the lights on… Then there are the billboards. Floodlit. Advertising rum and things like that.”
A caller had apparently recently told a radio station he did not understand why Eskom was asking people to switch off geysers because he paid for electricity and it was not his problem.
”They don’t understand that if they don’t switch off their geysers, soon enough we are going to have load-shedding,” said Mbeki.
On Friday morning, he had asked his staff for a report on their efforts to switch off geysers at his official residence Mahlamba Ndlovu, in Pretoria.
They had ”not quite implemented” the energy-saving measures Mbeki had requested.
While they had located most switches for the geysers, there were two they were ”still looking for”, and had felt unable to tell the president that ”these two have beaten us”.
”I’m going to check when I go back now whether they have found the last two switches,” he said.
Describing the community development workers as ”foot soldiers”, Mbeki said they had to ensure the country’s people responded to ”this national emergency”.
”And it requires going house to house, the work that you do every day, to convince the people, to show the people, that each one of us can make a contribution.
”At the end, we are going to depend on you to make sure that the country rises and acts together to respond to this national emergency,” Mbeki said. – Sapa