… That is access to a reliable electricity supply in South Africa.
The recent power outages — not unusual for residents of the country’s (still exclusively) black townships — is now more widespread as the state electricity utility, ESKOM, has embarked on ‘load shedding’ — a practice that involves the temporary cut off of power to some consumers (that means when Sandton has electricity, Alexandra is dark or the other way around.)
Why now and on such a scale? To find out why, it does not help turning to the South African media: A quick survey online indicates very poor reporting on the crisis (lots of outrage and he-said-she-said reporting, but little explanation or context). On the web, what one finds are invective, stereotypes (the usual ‘blacks don’t know how to govern’) and myth (including that old one: every South African had a good, reliable electricity supply under apartheid).
Surprisingly one of the better attempts at providing historical context comes courtesy of the Washington Post’s Johannesburg correspondent Craig Timberg who points to some of the reasons behind the blackouts:
South Africa’s infrastructure, designed by apartheid-era planners to serve primarily a small white minority, is groaning nearly 14 years after the onset of multiracial democracy. The new era’s economic growth has brought an unprecedented rise in traffic jams and housing demand, and power shortages have become so widespread that they have idled vast swaths of the continent’s most important economy for hours at a time in recent weeks …
The blackouts are the result of surging demand and stagnant supply, exacerbated by a failed push toward privatization that made it difficult for Eskom to build the power plants needed to serve new customers in this country of 44 million.
From 1997 to 2005, demand rose 30 percent faster than supply in South Africa, according to US Energy Department statistics. The problem has worsened dramatically in the past two years, analysts say. About 70 percent of South Africans now have access to electricity, roughly double the percentage under apartheid. Eskom predicts supply shortages will last for the next five to seven years, until several new plants can be built.
(Not that this explanation is any quick comfort to those enduring the power outages every day.)
Full article here.
Filed under: South Africa, power outages
