Stage 6 load shedding leaves S. Africans angry, fed up - Happiness Index
The latest Gross National Happiness Index report shows the mood of South Africans took a dip since the announcement of stage 6 load shedding on Sunday to nearly its lowest since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
South Africans are saddled with the rising cost of living, high levels of crime, poor service delivery, and rolling blackouts under Eskom's buckling grid.
According to the latest Gross National Happiness Index, South Africans who are often resilient to the challenges they face, are frustrated and pessimistic.
The warning of a constrained power system is one many have come to dread and with up to eight hours of now power under stage 6 load shedding, so it's no wonder the overall happiness of South Africans dipped to below the 2022 average of 6.85 to 6.44 out of 10 on Monday.
The happiness index project was launched in April 2019 by University of Johannesburg Professor Talita Greyling, Dr Stephanie Rossouw from the Auckland University of Technology, and Afstereo to measure the real-time emotions and happiness levels of South Africans.
They construct the indices by extracting real-time tweets from Twitter, encoding them using Natural Language Processing (machine learning methods), and applying a balancing algorithm to derive emotion measures per hour.
"We do an analysis of the tweets and encode eight different emotions which are among others, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and joy. And among these eight different emotions, we found negative emotions increased. Negative emotions are higher than they have been for a long time, and we find the positive emotions such as joy decreased," Greyling said.
The index found that the rolling power cuts increased feelings of fear, anger, and disgust among South Africans.
Nah if loadshedding is going to be with us forever I think “ how to cross a four way stop” should be added to the matric syllabus because yoh i can’t be fighting for my life at every intersection.
— honey (@Hannah_Limbada) September 19, 2022
Many of us complain about loadshedding cos we can't charge our phones or the wifi is down. Meanwhile there's someone who is literally at the risk of dying if this loadshedding madness continues!
— Lydia Teleki (@lydia__teleki) September 21, 2022
We've let this government get away with atrocities for long#FedupWithLoadshedding pic.twitter.com/yTeBLmJDR6
In 2019 the President cut his trip to Egypt to deal with an “unprecedented” stage 6 load shedding, three years later he does the same cutting his trip to the United States of America at UNGA short. What has changed at Eskom since that “unprecedented” stage 6 of 2019?
— #LordOfTheMedia (@samkelemaseko) September 18, 2022
President Cyril Ramaphosa met with his Cabinet to deliberate on the energy crisis on Wednesday, and Greyling says the public is fed up and wants practical solutions to the power crisis.
She's warned policymakers must consider this when deciding on new policies, as an uptick in negative emotions often results in 'action', such as demonstrations, from citizens.
"We can't say what will happen in the future, but these are possible leading indicators to say, 'be aware, watch out,' people are not happy, they are angry and frustrated. Many show a sign of hopelessness, more than they did during COVID, and that to me is a signal that people are in a bad space at the moment and think about it before you create any policies."
Greyling says government should come up with an action plan and work towards instilling hope and optimism which are low at the moment.
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