First Eskom, now Telkom -- who's next?

I have promised to reveal what one good or positive trait of mine I would willingly relinquish if given the chance to live my life again. I failed on my promise … and therein lies a parable.

I have been offline again — thanks entirely to the unimaginable incompetence of Telkom, its ingrained policy of making life as difficult and costly for its clients as possible, the huge fraud that is ADSL, and its open hostility and disdain towards customers.

If that sounds harsh, try this. In desperation, I asked to be put through directly to the CEO, Reuben September. As a client who pays Telkom’s exorbitant costs and his substantial salary, I believe I have every right to speak to him. And he is obliged to take my call.

I was eventually told by one Lerina, who was supposedly “deputised” by September, that he was busy. Fair enough, I thought. I asked when he would be available. The rather unpleasant Lerina said he would not be available at all — all week. I insisted on speaking to him and was told, bluntly: “Mr September is a very busy man and doesn’t have the time to speak to clients!” It later transpired that even his PA was too high and mighty to speak to “just anybody”.

Is it any wonder Telkom has become synonymous with almost everything that is negative about South Africa? Snap polls and vox pops surveys have shown Telkom to have the lowest across-the-board customer rating alongside the national disgrace that calls itself “home affairs”.

I am speechless in the face of organisations such as these that not only don’t give a shit about you or me, but blithely claim to be “proudly South African”. If they claim to represent the face and soul of our country, they are guilty of nothing less than treason. And I’m off to Darfur.

Telkom is soooo bad, it is the only company to have been kicked off the nation’s leading consumer watchdog website, HelloPeter.com, and blacklisted from it. But do you think September and the rest of his goodfellas give a damn?

Phone any Telkom 24-hour service helpline — sorry, there are only two! — and you will not be helped. If you are helped first time, send me an email and I will give you R100 in cash. That’s how sure I am.

It is little wonder most telecoms pundits doubt Telkom will come anywhere near delivering on its promises for 2010. The place is haemorrhaging staff worse than the Sowetan and those that remain, in my experience, are utterly incompetent. And they couldn’t give a flying foxtrot what you think.

The previous head honcho, Sizwe Nxasana, at least had the decency to pretend to care. By contrast, September has stamped the Alfred E Neuman (of MAD magazine fame) philosophy of “What, me worry?” on the organisation.

The media are held in open disdain by the absence of a media-liaison structure. No phone is ever answered first time — which is very bizarre since Telkom’s business is telephony! That would be like going to a bakery where there is never any bread or consulting a dietician bed-ridden by obesity.

Telkom couldn’t give a sailor’s curse for corporate image or public relations either. That would mean having a department charged with those responsibilities and, try as I may for more than an hour, none was to be had. And when I told the person on the switchboard I wanted media liaison, he put me through to Telkom Media, the outfit that’s supposedly going to challenge the SABC!

One has come to expect mandatory service-delivery sinkholes as the standard by-product of Thabo’s unusual business ethic, but what blew me away on the weekend was:

the shortest time for a call to be answered was 22 minutes, and

all lines were experiencing “unusually high call volumes” all the time — including my calls at 00.45am, 2.35am, 3.50am and 4.40am (Sunday). This is just a blatant lie, obviously sanctioned by September and his cronies.

Since I was summarily cut off on Wednesday, I made a total of 54 cellphone calls at a cost of R392, used a tank of petrol (R318) to deliver messages I would normally email, sent 21 faxes at about R7 a pop and spent a total of 18 hours on the phone fighting the apathy and incompetence — including two 30-minute slots in Telkom’s office at Clearwater Mall (during which time I managed to persuade three people not to even think about ADSL via Telkom).

It will be as futile to expect fair reimbursement from Telkom as it was to expect prompt, professional service in the first place. But I’m buggered if I’m going to pay for five days without telephone or internet services!

This set me to musing, not just a little angrily, on why our country seems so dead set on retrogression or at least stagnation (pun!). Why are so many institutions moonwalking all over our dreams? How has the ANC gone from hero to Nero in three short terms?

In the build-up to the 1994 elections, I was spokesman for the Chamber of Mines and, with every eye on the planet focused on South Africa, every journo on the planet wanted some sort of potted pen picture of the country; a neat sound bite from the South. The mining industry was the ideal microcosm of the country. We were the thumbnail of the tensions, hopes, fears, dreams, demons and demographics of this potential bloodbath.

And, man, did we give interviews!

While struggling to stay awake during Thabo’s tacky little talk on Friday, I contemplated (since I couldn’t work thanks to Telkompetence) our country — alive with possibilities, fraught with fear and loathing and doomed to get far, far worse before we get better. Where are the thumbnails now?

And then that rather lonely little coat-hanger figure at the podium in front of Baleka Mbete (btw, if she is the most powerful woman in South Africa today, why was she wearing leftover Christmas wrapping from Woolies?) gave the answer himself — the Eskom fiasco and resultant energy crisis.

One doesn’t have to throw bones, chat with the ancestors or be able to read the entrails of a goat to see Telkom is in a state of disarray — just as one didn’t need to read the flights of swallows a year ago to have recognised the impending meltdown at Eskom.

And why this (as Borat would say) “retardation”? Arrogant management too inflated with its own importance to hear the pleas and cries from ordinary folks like you and me.

Working in PR in the early 1980s, we would counsel our clients not to reject but to utilise the grapevine to take the pulse of their companies. We did so successfully with the CSIR and the Atomic Energy Commission.

Telkom’s grapevine isn’t whispering; it’s bellowing: “There’s shit in our shop.” Just like Eskom’s grapevine began murmuring three years ago.

And there are numerous other apathetic megaliths in similar positions — SAA, Sasol, the SAPS, the SABC, most government departments, numerous municipalities and, of course, the people of South Africa. But the fat cats and the suits and party boys and girls just tip their caps over their eyes, give a little whoop and moonwalk backwards off the stage of responsibility.

Like Telkom and Eskom and home affairs, they talk a schuweet beat, but their prattle is just more pointless paper promises. I tried phoning 10111 three weeks ago because there was brawl down the road from where I live. The phone rang 20 times before I hung up. I heard the next day a guy had been stabbed, but who knows if he lived or died?

The blatant neglect of their responsibilities by the likes of Eskom, Telkom and the cops are symptomatic of a fundamental and diseased mindset, a deeply ingrained cultural myopia that looks set in stone. That’s what makes me so downright depressed. It is everywhere — like a virus, like crime, like an attitude that says: I am da Boss. I am il Capo di tutti Capi. I am Nero. See me quote Dickens. See me fall over at my own wedding.

And if you don’t like it, you can leave. The characteristic I wish I’d never been given is my eager, blind, stupid willingness to trust.