TOM EATON | Stage 15 is when the nerves black out, but some of us may be past that point

The explosive reaction to Andre de Ruyter speculating about theoretical stage 15 load-shedding has once again confirmed that roughly 50% of middle class rage would be evaporated by a 10% improvement in middle class reading skills.

Of course, I understand that we’re primed for over-reaction. Load-shedding is an emotional trigger on a national scale. One can get used to pretty much anything if it becomes a routine, but the erratic nature of load-shedding, with its lurching, apparently arbitrary leaps between stages, is a rusty scalpel sawing at our last nerve.

And when the person who is either fixing the problem excruciatingly slowly, or making it rapidly worse, depending on your view, starts throwing around talk of load-shedding stages in their mid-teens, it really does all start feeling a bit bonkers.

In this case, however, I suspect only a fraction of the people who exploded all over social media had read past the headline, and only a fraction of those had understood what De Ruyter had actually said.

In case it’s still not clear, his point was this: SA’s fleet of coal-fed power stations is a dirty, stinking beast, belching us well up the list of the world’s worst polluters, and if Eskom is going to be forced to obey local air quality laws, it will either have to clean up that filthy beast or shut down the slinkiest parts of it.

According to Dr Ruyter, that shutdown would remove 16GW from the national grid, or, put another way we’re all too familiar with, usher in stage 15 load-shedding.

Many angry Twitterers described his comment as a “threat”, and I must say there did seem to be a whiff of brinkmanship about it. The only direct threat I heard, however, was to the quality of our air, which will clearly not get fixed any time soon.

Besides, I’m not sure how stage 15 could be very much worse than the threat we’ve all had explained to us over and over again for years now: the collapse of the national grid, and the complete anarchy that would descend on this country during the many days — “a few weeks”, according to Eskom — it would take to hard reboot the system.

Again, those who believe that De Ruyter is a minion of the Illuminati will insist this itself is a hollow threat designed to extort yet more money from us. But I’m not so sure: in my experience of James Bond films, real villains only threaten to blackmail people when they have real leverage and control, and I don’t think De Ruyter is in control of very much of anything right now, least of all his continued employment.