Government Land in Gauteng – Is the Premier in Fantasyland?

 

In his State of the Province address, the Premier of the Gauteng Province stated that part of the plan to alleviate the critical electricity shortage in the Province, a part of the legacy of the ANC that is in the process of completing the ANC’s plan to destroy the country’s economy, it is intended to install rooftop solar panels on all Provincial buildings.  He declared with a smile that there will be more than eight hundred square kilometres of such panels!

One might be pardoned for expressing doubt about the sanity of this statement.

Eight hundred square kilometres of rooftop, if applied to a calculation of 60% coverage of the land, translates to 1 333 333 square kilometres of land used by the Provincial administration, about 13 300 Hectares!

The cost of the solar panels, about 384 trillion square metres, assuming an installed cost of R1 800 per square meter (ignoring the 40% to 60% add-on for corruption), would cost a staggering R691 200 trillion Rands – enough to buy Eskom, pay the retrenchment costs of the top hundred Managers, and operate the utility for several years!  That is almost enough to buy the nuclear power stations that the ANC has signed up for!

One has only to do the calculations on the savings if 10% of the (useless) Civil servants occupying all of that space were to be fired to realize that the plans of the worth Premier to secure the industrial base of the country can be realised in dozens of different ways.  Of course, we all know that politicians love to make grand statements, but the huge scope of this promise makes the whole address about as credible as Jacob Zuma’s promise that ‘we have a plan’!