I watched a brief snippet of Good Morning South Africa this morning which covered the billing challenges of the electricity department in Johannesbug. The headline case was a guy who has been going into the help centre every month for the last two years because the department has mistakenly been billing his home as a factory. As a result he gets a bill of about R20 000.00 per month instead of what he should be paying - perhaps something around R2 000.00?

The story reminded me of an article I wrote about 4 years ago - one of the lost articles in the TFSA upgrade, so I've just reposted it on my blog. It's about competence, or perhaps more relevant to this case, the lack of it in South Africa.

How is it possible that anyone has to go back to an organisation every month for two years with the same problem?
What would it take to fix this man's problem? Five minutes, half an hour, an hour perhaps of some clerk's time?
Why hasn't this man's problem been fixed?

And just look at the price!
Massive waste of manhours, and apparently he is not the only one. The call centre is absolutely snowed under with people who have similar problems.

Well, if you aren't going to solve what is causing the problem, of course it's going snowball!

What is their excuse?