… so how many left at the end of last month?
It’s the start of February. I woke up this morning with a sense of dread I’ve been nursing for a couple of weeks. A little while ago I had a huge conversation with a ZESA (Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) technician. The two of us were standing on the side of the road while he waited out a rain shower so he could carry on fixing the pole just outside my elderly aunt’s house. I was standing in the rain because I wanted to make darn sure he completed the job before he left, because it had taken me days and phone calls with the help of friends to get a guy out there! My poor aunt had been without power for days.
Anyway, he told me that he was leaving at the end of the month (leaving the country, not ZESA). I was dismayed. And by that I mean seriously, deeply and very dismayed… I wanted to cry!
“What are we going to do!” I wailed.
“I don’t know”, he replied, very seriously. I felt the full impact of his words. It isn’t amusing at all when the ZESA guys themselves just say they have no idea what us ordinary people are going to do about the power. These are the guys with the knowledge, the skills and they have had enough. They are jumping ship, giving up and abandoning us to a rocky powerless fate. I don’t blame them, and it frustrates me that we have no way to encourage them to stay. Then it frustrates me all over again that our damn government isn’t doing more to keep them happy and able to stay at home.
The conversation got worse - a lot worse!
He then went on to tell me that he had heard that as many as 200 technicians would be leaving the country at the end of January, and he said absolutely every single person he knew working at ZESA had their ‘papers in’ to various other countries so they could leave too. Apparently our guys are in big demand around the world.
So when I woke up this morning I first listened for the hum of electricity before reaching for the light switch to double-check.
Yes, we have power today. But for how long?
I have a deep dread for what we’re about to face. We’ve learned how to cope - difficult as it is - without fuel for cars and transport. But an absence of power is very hard to adjust too: businesses close, factories shut down, deep freezes defrost and crime increases. The list of hardships and irritants is endless.
