Leadership Starts With You (And Me)
Sjoe…
It’s only been two weeks and 2023 is already a trip.
South Africa is a nation destined to be defined by layers. We have the highest disparity of socioeconomic strata in the world. During COVID’s lockdown era, we were obsessed with levels. Now it’s all about stages.
Stage 4,5,6.
8?
How can we entrepreneurs operate as the so-called ‘engine-room of South Africa’ when we can’t even start the engine?
We’re getting reports from the Heavy Chef community about all kinds of unforeseen challenges as a result of this mess. More and more people are shutting their doors because they cannot run their businesses. I saw this on my road trip in 2022 when dropping into small towns across the country. Too many small shops, restaurants, kiosks and outlets were left in the dark by Eskom.
It’s confusing for most of us. It’s hard to understand why this is happening. Despite warnings from as far back as the 1990s we have not made the radical up-levels that were prescribed.
There are surprising and insidious consequences to South Africa’s inability to solve the energy crisis.
Cape Town, where I live, has become sewage-central. I’m told loadshedding is causing pump stations to trip. This in turn is causing back-ups and burst pipes.
Cape Town, pristine city of a million postcards, is now becoming known for strangely beautiful mushroom-shaped sewage plumes surging out into the ocean.
Yup. I’m gonna be postponing that Robben Island swim for a bit.
One friend, who happens to be in the renewables space, explained it like this. South Africa’s power stations are like a fleet of minibus taxis that have been running for decades. After a few million kilometers on the clock, they’re naturally going to start breaking down. In response, the fleet manager assigns the remaining minibuses to go faster, work harder and run more trips. Naturally, this results in accidents, more breakdowns, and further wear-and-tear of the remaining fleet.
We can see where this is going, right? This is logical stuff.
Obvs, the questions arise, why were no alternatives created since the 90s? Why did the people in charge ignore all the warnings?
The lack of leadership makes even me, a die-hard optimist, grumpy.
‘Never waste a good crisis’ was the catch-phrase during COVID. There are some companies that are doing good work despite the mayhem. The rise of innovative solar systems like Sun Exchange, Gosolr, Versofy and others are signals of entrepreneurial opportunity.
These companies are doing good - and doing good - during this mess.
Heavy Chef is looking for others. We want to learn from examples of small businesses doing great work in the dark. We want to uncover the true leaders, showing resilience and creativity to progress through the various layers of loadshedding.
My colleagues, Louis and crew over at the Heavy Chef Foundation are researching this type of innovation. We’d love to hear your examples of leadership in crisis - and we’d like to feature some of these entrepreneurs on our platform.
We’re in the midst of a revolution, whether we like it or not.
In a revolution such as this we have to celebrate the real leaders.
That’s you, and me, and the rest of us - this beautiful community of doers (not talkers) fighting in the trenches.
Peace.
