Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Rant: What Vision 2020 when simple electricity can't be provided?

Its 6am Malaysia time and we just received our electricity from Tenaga after suffering a black out for almost 12 hours.

The only call that we managed to make to Tenaga Nasional (after two hours of avoiding us), our sole national electricity provider, yielded only the following informations "We know about it lah, it's a trip lah, working on it!"

The blackout was contained to an area of about 100 houses or so. There has been no rain let alone thunderstorm, the only reasonable explanation for any blackout to occur. One black out is alright but I know that blackouts occur regurlarly here. Probably once every two months.

Of course every negative has a postive and some did emerge from this episode. We managed to have a little family re-bonding. Its nice how an evening could be spent sitting in the porch admiring the bright moon and enjoying the cool breeze...

Plus I did sweat alot. Good for losing a little bit of fat.

Seriously though, this country prides itself of being a developing nation. There are few ways out of this shithole - one to renationalised Tenaga and the other is to deregulate the industry hence letting in competitors. Modernisation is the other way forward and one which I favour most.

Flicking through the pages of a January 2005 Star paper I found out that there was a blackout in KL. Now my initial thoughts about that was this is not worthy of front page reporting (I still do) as though it were some political scandal or terrorist attack so I found the whole thing amusing.

No, the point is the criticism afforded to Tenaga during that saga should have shaken the company to its core.

Malaysia boleh?

No comments: