Skip to main content

Westake, Statues, Electricity, and our City and Country

Dear all

http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/00eba98047ffa988b8d2ff4405f77b26/Nine-arrested-during-Steenberg-taxi-protest-20150413

It took me 1 hour 40 mins to get to Westlake Business Park today.

It normally takes 45 mins during traffic and 60 mins on a bad day and 30 mins without traffic.

At least it kept the petrol companies happy!

But it really destroyed the productivity of every business in Westlake today and possibly this entire week due to additional stress.

Additional unnecessary stress after the recent fires in the area where people also couldn't get to work.

Some of us really want to work and continue helping to make South Africa great - for ALL its people!

For myself, I returned to SA back in July 1995. I left the OLD South Africa in 1987 and returned to the NEW South Africa in 1995, 20 years ago this year.

As you all know, my blood type is B+ (be positive) and I am an optimist. I believe that if you are a cynic or pessimist, then you cannot survive in South Africa.

South Africa is an incredible place. Full of possibility. It's time for our leaders to stand up to this racism and nip it in the bud.

When people resort to violence BEFORE they have even tried to negotiate, then we are in trouble. And when leaders, like the UCT Council, cave in without regard for due process, then they set a really bad precedent. And then when rival taxi associations resort to violence in the middle of a busy city intersection, when they could have met elsewhere, then we have a potential crisis. Fortunately the police took appropriate action and I salute them today.

I personally think that ALL statues and monuments should be removed in South Africa. Who wants to spend money building monuments, maintaining them and fighting about them, when there are so many more important things to think about like electricity, water, nourishment, our air, pollution, etc?

In the past few weeks, there have been hardly any articles in the newspapers about Eskom and the electricity crisis.

Before the Statue crisis, there were all sorts of letters and articles in the press every day.

The public have been sidetracked into this stupid behaviour and are missing the point. Without Medupi power station, which should have been completed 2 years ago and which should have started supplying the grid with electricity long before that, there are at least a million people without jobs. Another million people don't have jobs because Kusile power station is incomplete. And millions more don't have jobs because so much more of our energy resources are corroded or incomplete.

It's time for us all to refocus our energies where they are needed. Not on some past issues that non of us can resolve, but rather on working together to make this country how we all want it to be, a land of opportunity, a land of ubuntu, and a land of wealth and plenty for all.

Regards
David

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Preventing Load Shedding (Power Failures)

Dear all There are a few very simple ways of preventing load sheeting and potentially preventing the building of any more power stations in South Africa: 1) Switch off all appliances at the plug including computers, tv's, etc, when they are not being used. If it is inconvenient to get to the plug, use an extension cord from the wall and plug the plug in the wall into the extension cord. You can then unplug the plug at any time. 2) Don't run more than one of the following appliances at the same time: washing machine, dish washer, iron, lawnmower, kettle, microwave, kitchen mixer, oven/stove. 3) Switch off your playstation when it is not in use; same with your DSTV decoder. Both draw almost as much power when they are on standby as when they are on, so if you only watch 3 hours of TV a day, you are wasting electricity for the other 21 hours. 4) Try to use a laptop instead of a PC. Laptop's can save up to 95% of the electricity that PC's use. 5) If you use air-conditio...

Repair Your World: Solving the electricity crisis at no tax cost to the treasury

My latest letter to the Cape Times editor. Melanie Gosling's articles this week and NERSA today (24th February 2010) approving 25% increases (95% over 3 years) refer. My company has a number of clients who wish to provide their own energy. We don't believe that we can rely on Eskom energy. It isn't sustainable. It isn't clean. Not only is coal polluting the air, mining it is polluting our water resources and destroying our roads. If we weren't in a recession Eskom energy wouldn't be enough for our requirements, so there is no true security of supply, especially as Eskom has not got the increase they wanted. Lastly, in the medium to long term, Eskom's energy is not affordable for our clients and there are already affordable alternatives. However, most of the clients we consult to are too small to fit into the 1 Megawatt bracket which gets the feed in tariff (REFIT). And the REFIT itself is a farce because the government has implemented a tender system w...

Jewish people have some secrets. Here are two of them.

One of these secrets is that we have one day off a week. Another of these secrets is that we welcome dissenting and opposite views. We  welcome Outliers. The Zohar and Talmud are full of opposing opinions and views, even opposing legal  views. I’m studying The Zohar, the Ancient Book of Kabbalah, which dissects the Tanach  and shows why things have been said the way they’ve been said and why things  happened the way they happened. There are many times when I read something, and I  don’t agree with it. I know that if I wait then at some point I will get an opposing view,  which I may or may not agree with. There are even discussions about why a word might  have an extra vav, or why a word doesn’t have a vav. Unfortunately, this internal strength in Judaism is used by our enemies to undermine us  as they will find a Jew who is against Zionism or who uses words like Occupation or  Genocide to say that this is how Jews feel generally. Yet if they...