Financiers and academics around the world have hailed a “game-changing” development that is “likely to change the face of capitalism forever”.

South Africa’s electricity parastatal on 28 June 2011 unveiled the “Eskom Economics”, which have seen its profits double by the simple means of hugely hiking its tariffs.

“Why didn’t we think of this?” said MTN spokesperson Antenna Ndlovu, one of hundreds of business leaders to express jealousy and regret. “From now on, R50 of cellphone credit will retail for R100.”

Eskom’s annual results, released on 28 June, revealed that the state power supplier has more than doubled its profits over the last year. A profit of R8.36 billion was recorded for the last financial year. This strong performance is attributed to a tariff increase of 24.8%, a percentile rise known in economic jargon as a “moerse rip-off”.

“The beauty of the plan lay in its simplicity,” said Eskom’s chief financial officer, Dief van der Merwe. “We were like: ‘How, oh how, are we going to actually make some money off the back of a product which is built around unremittingly shitty service and completely unreliable supply?’

“We had some of our best minds working on it,” he noted. “At first, we thought we could get people to use more electricity by asking the government to pass a law, making it compulsory for people to keep their Christmas fairy lights on all-year round.

“Then we thought maybe we should crack down on everyone who steals electricity by running a cable from other people’s power supply,” Van der Merwe continued.

“And when we looked into it, we realised that that was literally everyone in the country except for one road in Bantry Bay, which essentially supplies the country’s national grid.”

Eskom announced that as a token of appreciation, it would be sending muffin baskets to the 15 homes on Nettleton Drive from whom the rest of the country
steals electricity.

“It’s really the least they can do,” said Benny Levine, 55, of 16 Nettleton Drive. “This year, my power bill ran to R1.4bn, which I thought was a bit steep, but I reckoned the funicular up the driveway probably sucked up quite a lot of juice.”

Meanwhile, businesspeople locally and internationally have lined up to praise the Eskom Economics model, which sees profits double by means of drastically overcharging for a sub-standard product.

“We will be adopting this approach immediately,” said Shoprite chief executive officer, Crapstuff Ntoni. “We’ve already gone round the shop with a Koki, adding two zeros to every price.”

This public service announcement comes courtesy of Hayibo

www.hayibo.com.