As someone who grew up and went to uni in SA, then later emigrated to NZ (and later Europe) in 2007, this is completely expected.
My understanding is that what happened is, in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped; of course it was in many ways an evil government, but it was also a surprisingly competent one, the only government to produce nuclear weapons and decide on their own to dismantle them or something? So anyway, all their plans for much-needed energy infrastructure upgrades were scrapped in 1994, and never considered again until the rolling blackouts started, by which time it was far too late. Since then the nearly universal corruption within the ANC and overall state capture meant things rapidly got worse, not better.
I distinctly remember writing code to do periodic saves of a long running computation's state, because the power would just randomly go out, and at one point the power went out while saving the state, so I switched to saving A/B alternating state files.
Most of my family is still hanging out in SA and things just get worse and worse... don't even get me started on the crime...
Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? When can one stop blaming the apartheid? Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
I agree. Successive governments have had 28 years to build and upgrade power infrastructure. Negligence and corruption have prevented that. Electricity is just one symptom of a much greater problem in SA. Apartheid was clearly immoral, but they handed over the keys to a very productive economy, on land with some of the best resources in the world, on which they had built excellent infrastructure. Since 1994, every single development metric has continued to decline. Everything from literacy to health outcomes to infrastructure. In September, the government passed a Zimbabwe-style bill which will allow it to seize land on the basis of race (https://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00083533.html). Within a matter of years we will begin seeing famine; in a nation with some of the best and most abundant farmland in the world.
South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. It has the raw ingredients to be a global economic powerhouse. What its government - and ostensibly the people voting for it - are doing to it is so sad to see.
> Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems?
No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.
> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?
It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.
> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
The ANC is structurally broken: that’s the bottom line.
The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.
I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…
Unfortunately you see this pattern often after a regime change, that the group that is able to seize power -- in this case, the ANC -- is not necessarily competent enough to govern. These are different skillsets. Message discipline, mobilization, guerrilla tactics, etc, don't transfer over to keeping the lights on. You have similar issues with present-day Taliban in Afghanistan.
> in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped
It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme.
I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy.
[1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector.
To add to your point: the roots of South Africa’s energy crisis date back to the early 90s, when the apartheid government was finishing up. Until the late 1980s, the apartheid government were into central planning, price controls and other state interventions (like many other western governments of that era). They started deregulating and privatising in the late 80s, and had already started cutting infrastructure spending by the early 90s.
Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do.
With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba).
Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand.
The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices.
With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician.
Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up.
The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well.
Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state.
South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue).
Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.
Long comments like this often look like they're going to present a serious diatribe but this is actually a balanced take.
The line "The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well" even radically undersells just how much of a debacle these two power stations have been. They were supposed to be the 8th/9th biggest coal stations in the world & accurately sized to solve the pending shortages in time, the major contracts went to legitimate companies like Alstom, GE & Hitachi. They were supposed to take approx. 5 years from 2007 and cost a reasonable approx. R30 billion each.
What's actually happened is that 15 years later neither is fully operational and the money spent has crossed 10x the original plans. The parts of the stations that currently do work are hamstrung by massive and debilitating design flaws that regularly cause trips or bigger issues (e.g. a smoke stack collapse last month) and there is no clear end for the construction in site even after all this time & money. And these aren't complex nuclear plants - these are just standard coal power stations. How to build them is quite well understood by now!
It's a combination of sustained and massive corruption (every now and then the current administration finds a few extra billion to recoup from a corrupt contractor), poor original designs that have complicated every subsequent step in the waterfall chart and finally unfortunate incompetence (for instance one of the 6 units at Medupi was entirely blown up after hydrogen wasn't vented before maintenance. The entire generator room must now be replaced with new parts from France at the cost of multiple billions of rands and over a year and a half of additional delay).
Finally, w.r.t. the reforms mention in parent comment's final line - I think they have a chance. South Africa has previously had a radically regulated energy sector. Basically you couldn't generate your own power, period. But due to the pressing political weight of the current situation there have been increasing steps away from the ideological commitment to exclusively state run coal powered grid. Large energy users and businesses can now do paperwork for approval to run their own multi-megawatt stations and basically every big factory, mine, mill etc. is now doing this to varying degrees. The big mining houses especially will spend a lot of money building their own infrastructure now. Between allowing the grid to buy private power (a lot of which is affordably priced renewable energy) and a lot of heavy demand starting to make its own power I think there's a fair chance things will stabilize in the next 2 years. The big question is electoral conferences and the next elections. If EFF wins meaningful electoral power there is a strong chance SA will go the route of Venezuela quicker than people think - and I say that as someone who is very committed to staying here and doesn't subscribe to most of the negative takes people can have about SA.
> My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants
Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0].
Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that.
And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country).
People do, but it's hard to get out. There are monetary controls, so you have to break the law to get your money out. You will also end up with very little once the exchange rate and fees are covered. So you will take a huge haircut on standard of living. But the standard of living in South Africa is something of an illusion anyway with horrific crime, a corrupt and incompetent government that confiscates private property, a jobs market heavily biased against people of non-African descent (very strong affirmative action), rolling blackouts, etc. My grandparents opted to stay and they did pretty much live out their days in relative comfort in their own house - but rarely saw their children or grandchildren.
> Have they ever tried to emigrate? And if yes, why are they still there?
Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space.
Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.
I think this kind of energy crisis article gives a bit of a skewed perspective of SA. South Africa is still an absolutely brilliant place to live.
I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood.
Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).
Unsure if emigration is still a viable option. Most my family came back to the UK in the 90s and took a massive hit on currency conversion, its got so much worse since then.
> ...the implication was that load shedding would in fact, be several stages above stage 4.
For the uninitiated, "load shedding" is a euphemism for "rolling blackouts". According to the wiki, Stage 4 load shedding leaves 25% of grid users without power. Assuming "several stages above stage 4" means Stage 7, that would mean that, at any given point, ~45% of grid users would be without power. [0]
Due to how long these power cuts have persisted a lot of businesses, industry and the middle class & up have almost habituated to the levels up to 4. Shopping centers have generators, business parks have full solar and retail stores have battery backup. For instance a local clothing chain (Foschini) installed 300+ Tesla powerwall setups so that all their locations can be totally uninterrupted even with 2.5/5/7.5 hours per day of power cuts. Cell towers, fiber infrastructure, hospitals, even traffic lights at busy intersections all have battery backup these days.
The reason this announcement is making the news is because levels above 4, like the two weeks or so of stage 6 we recently had are much more problematic. You start to run into issues where cell tower batteries can only charge like 80% back up with the number of hours powered per day - and so after a few days they no longer have enough charge to keep up with the interruptions and go offline, disrupting communications & internet access.
Additionally the provisions heavy industry has made over the years to deal with this become insufficient and you start to lose shifts and thus there's a lot of evidence the economy is very materially affected at these levels of cuts.
Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor and disrupts job growth when it's desperately needed, curtails foreign and local investment etc. To discuss how parts of society can easily function with the lower stages of power cuts is not to miss how insane this all is... A society of 60 million people has largely stood by while this has happened for approx. 15 years now. And it's not like this is a matter of a poor nation without the ability to invest - approximately $40 billion USD has been spent by the power utility just in capex alone in this period - and afterwards they are producing less power than at the start... Quote from a local article: "It means that Eskom destroyed 46 GWh of power generation per R1 billion spent on increasing its power generation." [1]
> Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor
Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.
What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.
I'm assuming that the need to recharge all those batteries means that, when the power gets turned back on, usage spikes very rapidly, making the problem worse.
Since those batteries aren't 100% efficient, a fair amount of this power is probably being lost to the batteries themselves.
> Between 2007 and 2021, Eskom invested R680 billion to increase its generation capacity. However, after this huge investment, Eskom produced less power than when it started.
The power plants started in 2007 with initial budgets of R79 billion and R81 billion and were due to be completed in 2012 and 2014. Neither are fully operational, produce far less than the design capacity of 4800MW, have significantly overrun their budgets (R145 B and R161 B respectively), and require another R33 B to finish! Is this all corruption or ???
edit:
Here's another article: https://archive.ph/LctJi . tl;dr: mismanagement, corruption, and a very long history of pricing power below cost and borrowing to cover. Plus handouts to inefficient coal suppliers creating that bad cost structure that wasn't passed on to buyers.
If they already have the infrastructure they should just skip ahead to 100% solar/wind power with no base load infrastructure. Storage/batteries at the endpoints makes base load redundant and wasteful.
> "If we continue to burn diesel the way we have for the past seven months, the cost would be astronomical. But we do not have the cash to spend. We would be able to pay if the *municipalities were paying us*,"
That, right there, is a pretty big reason for the current blackouts: The masses refuse to pay, and the cost of keeping society afloat falls to a minority who cannot really be squeezed any further.
Last I checked (2007), each taxpayer was supporting 4.3 people other than their dependents or themselves.
It is not a sustainable situation, and the state should have been doing everything it could to encourage foreign investment. Instead, empowered by the voters, they repeatedly loot the coffers.
Usually I like BBC's More or Less but their episode[1] on this situation really rubbed me the wrong way. They dismissed one elderly white couple's concerns with implied racism and didn't look at the trendline of per capita output from Eskom.
Any South African currently living there is completely unsurprised by this latest news.
Typical African country. I've always wondered what's wrong with my continent. You can't literally point to a single African country that's developed and successful...corruption and incompetence rules every sector here...so horrible.
Building institutions and culture takes centuries and can be lost quickly. Take heart that the West is burning its cultural capital quickly and becoming low trust as people start to realize they're in a reputation poor environment.
More than just that, it takes a lot of luck. You need people in power at key moments who can rise to the occasion and then peacefully pass along power. You need leaders who build institutions and not networks of patronage. You need people in place who are willing to accept the constraints of rule of law, and to establish that norm.
[*edit] can someone downvoting explain what they disagree with here?
yep. It's a small country but it's the oldest democracy on the continent, ranks quite highly internationally (30th on the democracy index, ahead of Italy), and has a gdp per capita only slightly lower than the baltics (20k). By most accounts a pretty tremendous success.
Look at a map of how alphabets spread and literacy rates. I think a more productive question would be not what is wrong with Africa but what was right with Europe.
Religion played a part. The best selling book after the printing press emerged was the Bible and majority of book sales revolved around religious texts. There was money to be made from this so it spread.
The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.
Before the campaign, the rate of illiteracy among city dwellers was 11% compared to 41.7% in the countryside
Present day Nigeria is still somewhere around 50%, somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Without universal literacy a country can't escape corruption, it is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to move to to the next stage. Not so long ago most everyone most everywhere was an illiterate peasant, the first places to grow out of that got first mover advantage.
> The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.
Actually it is more like 18th century in Austria-Hungary where compulsory school attendance (6 years long - just read, write, count) was established in 1774 School Reform under Empress Maria Theresa and the elementary school as I know it was established by The Imperial Elementary School Act (Reichsvolksschulgesetz) of 1869 standardized compulsory schooling as a whole and increased compulsory schooling from six to eight years.
Which is very nice history lesson, but does not answer the question of "why did European rulers even bothered with compulsory education at all".
Europe, America, China and even Russia have mercenaries corps (e.g. Glencore) that help African countries choose the right rulers, and when the ruler isn't right he gets replaced. The right ruler needs to be a chaotic plutocrat who cares only about himself and looks the other way when his home country is looted. As for IQ, it's a side effect of the above: NK and SK are the same people who live under different rulers for less than a century, but NKs are already much shorter. My guess is that in a hostile environments, the smarts and height genes stay dormant.
Rwanda's GDP per capita is $834 [1]. That's way worse than my poor country (Nigeria) at $2,085 [2], so that improvement is very much in question and under a dictator nonetheless.
Edit: Removed the part describing Kagame as genocidal because I mixed up his identity. He's still corrupt and power-drunk though.
> I've always wondered what's wrong with my continent.
It's a source of raw materials for powers outside of your continent, who pour money and arms into the hands of the cliques most willing and able to get those materials out of the country at the lowest price.
Any hint that a resource-cursed country wants to reign in its elites, regulate its environment or labor, or negotiate better prices is replied to with a torrent of funds directed to the people most willing to murder the reformers.
i tend to disagree. Africa has some countries with very good GDP growth over the past 20 years, higher than some developed countries (Japan) that are struggling with debt and demographic collapse.
Please name some...I really want to have hope. Most times, the countries people name like Rwanda are definitely improving but still far behind on a global development scale. Sure, Japan is struggling, but Japan's struggles seem like paradise to the average African country's struggles.
> Africa has some countries with very good GDP growth over the past 20 years
The key question is: just how much of that nominal growth ended up back at the population, and how much ended up in anonymous Swiss accounts or shell companies belonging to autocrats and their families/friends?
In most other countries this same problem is solved by raising prices. Which is better seems a subjective question - the zavway at least gives low income people access to some reasonably priced electricity.
Yeah, kept china, japan, south-korea and Hong Kong down. 3 generations later, they still suffer. The atrocities were real, the explanation power for current day missery diminishes rapidly.
My prefered theory is that human capital stays valuable even through crisis and that it pays of to be the direct cold conflict zone for two super powers, who then prop you up.
This whole thread is making me feel like I'm in an alternative reality...
The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.
And of course, in the best traditions, divisions were sown where one set of Native people were marked as better than another set, in a move that takes many generations to heal.
My country (Ireland) was colonised, we lost half our population to famine and emigration. We, almost, lost our language, out culture. We still have sectarian conflict. We didn't have one quarter the shit that was done to many parts of Africa. And, without Europe's money, we would still be a state completely dependent on our former colonisers.
Healing will take time, but to not mention the damage done, and still being done there is nonsense.
The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
> The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.
Our species is a violent one. The same can be said of other continents. Africa had the same problems long before America was hardly even a thing.
You could just as easily give counter examples of say gunboat diplomacy cracking open Japan and hurling it out of stasis and into modernity.
> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
You are not doing the people you purport sympathy for any favors with such an attitude.
Trains need to run, electric grids need to work. The observation on competency in no way implies endorsement of the previous government.
People are objectively worse off now, believe it or not (look into it before arguing), while you get to moralize from far away. Nobody is arguing for a return to the previous regime obviously.
> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with reading comprehension, but if you're suggesting that I'm an Apartheid apologist for trying to explain how things got the way they are and how it's completely on-brand mismanagement from the ANC government, you've got completely the wrong guy.
It is incredible how the collapse of SA, having happened over a moderately short span of time, has largely escaped coverage.
The infatuation with the "rainbow nation" and Mandela overcoming the evil apartheid government.
But the policies have just been a disaster. And in recent years, it's become so bad that we have to read news like this. Anyone that can get out, has or is getting out. I worked in a project with ppl from Johannesburg; suddenly they had moved to my country.
> At the briefing last week, Eskom provided a statistical forecast of load shedding over the next 10 months. The forecast showed that until August 2023, SA would experience stage 3 load shedding on most days of the month, provided that diesel was burned to make up for the shortfall. The diesel required to keep the system at Stage 3 varied from R3 billion to more than R7 billion a month. As burning this amount of diesel is physically and logistically impossible, the implication was that load shedding would in fact, be several stages above stage 4.
Not as bad as in Lebanon where state power infrastructure totally collapsed, and you now you buy your power from entrepreneurs in the neighborhood who have portable petrol/diesel generators.
I work from home so invested in two 1000KW inverters with 100AH AGM batteries for powering my fibre and servers (it has battery banks at the POP) and looking at replacing them with LifePO batteries when the AGM ones die.
Some companies are selling a rent a solar conversion for your home - you just make do.
Actually Cape Town - which system did you get and LifePo's - decided to split the load in my setup across two inverters so the recharge time would be limited to 100AH battery and not 2 x 100AH.
I am reading about the Hubble S-120 drop in replacement batteries with their own BMS but I am reading conflicting reports.
Readit News
My understanding is that what happened is, in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped; of course it was in many ways an evil government, but it was also a surprisingly competent one, the only government to produce nuclear weapons and decide on their own to dismantle them or something? So anyway, all their plans for much-needed energy infrastructure upgrades were scrapped in 1994, and never considered again until the rolling blackouts started, by which time it was far too late. Since then the nearly universal corruption within the ANC and overall state capture meant things rapidly got worse, not better.
I distinctly remember writing code to do periodic saves of a long running computation's state, because the power would just randomly go out, and at one point the power went out while saving the state, so I switched to saving A/B alternating state files.
Most of my family is still hanging out in SA and things just get worse and worse... don't even get me started on the crime...
South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. It has the raw ingredients to be a global economic powerhouse. What its government - and ostensibly the people voting for it - are doing to it is so sad to see.
No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.
> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?
It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.
> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.
I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…
Deleted Comment
It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme.
I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy.
[1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector.
[2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?member...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_S...
Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do.
With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba).
Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand.
The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices.
With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician.
Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up.
The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well.
Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state.
South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue).
Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.
The line "The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well" even radically undersells just how much of a debacle these two power stations have been. They were supposed to be the 8th/9th biggest coal stations in the world & accurately sized to solve the pending shortages in time, the major contracts went to legitimate companies like Alstom, GE & Hitachi. They were supposed to take approx. 5 years from 2007 and cost a reasonable approx. R30 billion each.
What's actually happened is that 15 years later neither is fully operational and the money spent has crossed 10x the original plans. The parts of the stations that currently do work are hamstrung by massive and debilitating design flaws that regularly cause trips or bigger issues (e.g. a smoke stack collapse last month) and there is no clear end for the construction in site even after all this time & money. And these aren't complex nuclear plants - these are just standard coal power stations. How to build them is quite well understood by now!
It's a combination of sustained and massive corruption (every now and then the current administration finds a few extra billion to recoup from a corrupt contractor), poor original designs that have complicated every subsequent step in the waterfall chart and finally unfortunate incompetence (for instance one of the 6 units at Medupi was entirely blown up after hydrogen wasn't vented before maintenance. The entire generator room must now be replaced with new parts from France at the cost of multiple billions of rands and over a year and a half of additional delay).
Finally, w.r.t. the reforms mention in parent comment's final line - I think they have a chance. South Africa has previously had a radically regulated energy sector. Basically you couldn't generate your own power, period. But due to the pressing political weight of the current situation there have been increasing steps away from the ideological commitment to exclusively state run coal powered grid. Large energy users and businesses can now do paperwork for approval to run their own multi-megawatt stations and basically every big factory, mine, mill etc. is now doing this to varying degrees. The big mining houses especially will spend a lot of money building their own infrastructure now. Between allowing the grid to buy private power (a lot of which is affordably priced renewable energy) and a lot of heavy demand starting to make its own power I think there's a fair chance things will stabilize in the next 2 years. The big question is electoral conferences and the next elections. If EFF wins meaningful electoral power there is a strong chance SA will go the route of Venezuela quicker than people think - and I say that as someone who is very committed to staying here and doesn't subscribe to most of the negative takes people can have about SA.
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My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants, who use it to get to their final destination (usually Australia).
(Canada serves a similar function for those seeking to move to the US.)
Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0].
Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that.
And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesst...
Source: my parents are from South Africa
Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space.
Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.
I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood.
Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).
For the uninitiated, "load shedding" is a euphemism for "rolling blackouts". According to the wiki, Stage 4 load shedding leaves 25% of grid users without power. Assuming "several stages above stage 4" means Stage 7, that would mean that, at any given point, ~45% of grid users would be without power. [0]
Yikes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis#Lo...
Due to how long these power cuts have persisted a lot of businesses, industry and the middle class & up have almost habituated to the levels up to 4. Shopping centers have generators, business parks have full solar and retail stores have battery backup. For instance a local clothing chain (Foschini) installed 300+ Tesla powerwall setups so that all their locations can be totally uninterrupted even with 2.5/5/7.5 hours per day of power cuts. Cell towers, fiber infrastructure, hospitals, even traffic lights at busy intersections all have battery backup these days.
The reason this announcement is making the news is because levels above 4, like the two weeks or so of stage 6 we recently had are much more problematic. You start to run into issues where cell tower batteries can only charge like 80% back up with the number of hours powered per day - and so after a few days they no longer have enough charge to keep up with the interruptions and go offline, disrupting communications & internet access.
Additionally the provisions heavy industry has made over the years to deal with this become insufficient and you start to lose shifts and thus there's a lot of evidence the economy is very materially affected at these levels of cuts.
Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor and disrupts job growth when it's desperately needed, curtails foreign and local investment etc. To discuss how parts of society can easily function with the lower stages of power cuts is not to miss how insane this all is... A society of 60 million people has largely stood by while this has happened for approx. 15 years now. And it's not like this is a matter of a poor nation without the ability to invest - approximately $40 billion USD has been spent by the power utility just in capex alone in this period - and afterwards they are producing less power than at the start... Quote from a local article: "It means that Eskom destroyed 46 GWh of power generation per R1 billion spent on increasing its power generation." [1]
[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/465641-eskom-blew-r...
Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.
What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.
Since those batteries aren't 100% efficient, a fair amount of this power is probably being lost to the batteries themselves.
> Between 2007 and 2021, Eskom invested R680 billion to increase its generation capacity. However, after this huge investment, Eskom produced less power than when it started.
The power plants started in 2007 with initial budgets of R79 billion and R81 billion and were due to be completed in 2012 and 2014. Neither are fully operational, produce far less than the design capacity of 4800MW, have significantly overrun their budgets (R145 B and R161 B respectively), and require another R33 B to finish! Is this all corruption or ???
edit: Here's another article: https://archive.ph/LctJi . tl;dr: mismanagement, corruption, and a very long history of pricing power below cost and borrowing to cover. Plus handouts to inefficient coal suppliers creating that bad cost structure that wasn't passed on to buyers.
> "If we continue to burn diesel the way we have for the past seven months, the cost would be astronomical. But we do not have the cash to spend. We would be able to pay if the *municipalities were paying us*,"
That, right there, is a pretty big reason for the current blackouts: The masses refuse to pay, and the cost of keeping society afloat falls to a minority who cannot really be squeezed any further.
Last I checked (2007), each taxpayer was supporting 4.3 people other than their dependents or themselves.
It is not a sustainable situation, and the state should have been doing everything it could to encourage foreign investment. Instead, empowered by the voters, they repeatedly loot the coffers.
[0] https://scroll.in/article/943564/does-not-tyranny-spring-fro...
Any South African currently living there is completely unsurprised by this latest news.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07jm2zy
Sorry for my rant :(
[*edit] can someone downvoting explain what they disagree with here?
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/me lifts hand and point finger to Botswanna.
It's probably best compared to something like Qatar, where the hope is it'll be able to use the diamond wealth to found another industry.
But there is always willingness to blame everybody else.
Religion played a part. The best selling book after the printing press emerged was the Bible and majority of book sales revolved around religious texts. There was money to be made from this so it spread.
The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_literacy_campaign
Present day Nigeria is still somewhere around 50%, somebody correct me if I'm wrong.Without universal literacy a country can't escape corruption, it is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to move to to the next stage. Not so long ago most everyone most everywhere was an illiterate peasant, the first places to grow out of that got first mover advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Actually it is more like 18th century in Austria-Hungary where compulsory school attendance (6 years long - just read, write, count) was established in 1774 School Reform under Empress Maria Theresa and the elementary school as I know it was established by The Imperial Elementary School Act (Reichsvolksschulgesetz) of 1869 standardized compulsory schooling as a whole and increased compulsory schooling from six to eight years.
Which is very nice history lesson, but does not answer the question of "why did European rulers even bothered with compulsory education at all".
Botswana. If you want to count the island nations, Cape Verde, Seychelles as well too.
Edit: Removed the part describing Kagame as genocidal because I mixed up his identity. He's still corrupt and power-drunk though.
1- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
It's a source of raw materials for powers outside of your continent, who pour money and arms into the hands of the cliques most willing and able to get those materials out of the country at the lowest price.
Any hint that a resource-cursed country wants to reign in its elites, regulate its environment or labor, or negotiate better prices is replied to with a torrent of funds directed to the people most willing to murder the reformers.
I think it's hard to build institutions, credibility and trust in a society.
The key question is: just how much of that nominal growth ended up back at the population, and how much ended up in anonymous Swiss accounts or shell companies belonging to autocrats and their families/friends?
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There Are No Successful Black Nations | And the indignity and helplessness of blacks in America won’t end until we have a first-world African nation to lift up our people. <https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_ar...>
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My prefered theory is that human capital stays valuable even through crisis and that it pays of to be the direct cold conflict zone for two super powers, who then prop you up.
This whole thread is making me feel like I'm in an alternative reality...
The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.
And of course, in the best traditions, divisions were sown where one set of Native people were marked as better than another set, in a move that takes many generations to heal.
My country (Ireland) was colonised, we lost half our population to famine and emigration. We, almost, lost our language, out culture. We still have sectarian conflict. We didn't have one quarter the shit that was done to many parts of Africa. And, without Europe's money, we would still be a state completely dependent on our former colonisers.
Healing will take time, but to not mention the damage done, and still being done there is nonsense.
The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
Our species is a violent one. The same can be said of other continents. Africa had the same problems long before America was hardly even a thing.
You could just as easily give counter examples of say gunboat diplomacy cracking open Japan and hurling it out of stasis and into modernity.
> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
You are not doing the people you purport sympathy for any favors with such an attitude.
Trains need to run, electric grids need to work. The observation on competency in no way implies endorsement of the previous government.
People are objectively worse off now, believe it or not (look into it before arguing), while you get to moralize from far away. Nobody is arguing for a return to the previous regime obviously.
What you're doing simply isn't helpful.
I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with reading comprehension, but if you're suggesting that I'm an Apartheid apologist for trying to explain how things got the way they are and how it's completely on-brand mismanagement from the ANC government, you've got completely the wrong guy.
The infatuation with the "rainbow nation" and Mandela overcoming the evil apartheid government.
But the policies have just been a disaster. And in recent years, it's become so bad that we have to read news like this. Anyone that can get out, has or is getting out. I worked in a project with ppl from Johannesburg; suddenly they had moved to my country.
I work from home so invested in two 1000KW inverters with 100AH AGM batteries for powering my fibre and servers (it has battery banks at the POP) and looking at replacing them with LifePO batteries when the AGM ones die.
Some companies are selling a rent a solar conversion for your home - you just make do.
Sorry to hear the situation in lebanon is not great, I hope your situation improves.
I am reading about the Hubble S-120 drop in replacement batteries with their own BMS but I am reading conflicting reports.