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SunPower turns up the heat ... and
turns on the taps!
If you are, by grim misfortune, in the town of Paterson in the Eastern Cape this
morning you might turn on your tap.
Water will probably come out...
And that's BIG stuff.
It will be the first water to flow out of the taps in that neglected place
for SIX years!
Daily Sun helped it happen.
It's been a saga... but as we said in our paper this week: “The good news is
that the service delivery crisis CAN be beaten!”
At the beginning of January this year one of our hotshots in the Eastern Cape,
Mkhuseli Sizani, heard about Paterson's plight.
We ran a picture of a woman collecting water in a bucket ... from a small canal
that she was sharing with a pig!
It was a powerful image.
And here at the nerve centre of the battlestar, I took the view that
Paterson's plight was a symbol of the service delivery nightmare - and all the
associated wrecked dreams - around the country.
And it is ANYWHERE around the country...
Just ask them in Orange Farm where flames were rising this week, ask them in
Standerton where the ashes are still warm, in just about every town in the North
West...even in the shanty townships in the sand around Cape Town.
Lack of service delivery - or, more accurately, broken promises about service
delivery - are the ANC's big problem.
In light of all that we decided here to see if we could fix things...
Could SunPower triumph where ANC blahblahblahing had so clearly failed?
So we put the cross-hairs on Paterson to find out.
A river of stories and headlines followed.
The local mayor had been sitting numbly, so far as I could see, for a long time.
No more.
Now the biggest daily in Africa was piling on the pressure.
We exposed all the usual villains: Laziness, corruption, disinterest,
ineptitude...
We hammered on the doors of the so-called provincial government... we pounded on
the portals of the national Department of Water...
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! The Madam Mayor must have felt like she was inside an anthill
under relentless attack by an anteater outside...
She said, in the end, water would flow again by the end of February....
So, obviously, we did all we could to hold her to the promise.
And as reported in our paper
(click here >> and
here >>), some water, at least,
flows again.
I think it shows that artfully-guided brute force works ... success through
terror perhaps?
I want to do it again ... so we're in the process of selecting a new target.
It's not so difficult...there's one around every corner...
Regards
Deon du Plessis
SunPublisher
about 4 hours ago from SunPublisher, Deon du Plessis
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