Lights Out in South Africa – IOTW Report

Lights Out in South Africa

Monday, 20 February 2023, 16:30 MJA Uncategorized 14

GZeroMedia: Things are dark in South Africa right now, both metaphorically and literally. Though not new, rolling blackouts have worsened in recent months, disrupting every aspect of daily life. With the situation near breaking point, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a state of disaster in recent days, which allows the government to bypass bureaucratic hurdles to get stuff done.

Why are things so dire in Africa’s most industrialized country, and what’s the government’s plan – if any – to fix it?

Lights out. The current crisis is centered largely on South Africa’s collapsing state-run electricity grid, which relies on coal for 85% of its generation capacity. Blackouts and load shedding occur when demand outstrips supply, forcing the utility company to cut access – which has been happening regularly for years.

Meanwhile, Eskom, the state-owned energy company, which runs 90% of the country’s electricity, has long been plagued by government corruption, cronyism, and mismanagement – most of which occurred under President Jacob Zuma, who is now facing a host of corruption charges. Consider that since 2007, no fewer than 14 people have been tapped to lead the energy agency, and they have left Eskom in rough shape, with the body now $26 billion in the red.

“Over the last 15 years there’s really been a deterioration in being able to add generation capacity to the national grid – or adding new sources of capacity whether that’s nuclear or renewable energy,” says Eurasia Group expert Ziyanda Stuurman. MORE

14 Comments on Lights Out in South Africa

  4. Gee, I wonder what changed in the last several years that took Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and South Africa from economic power houses to dystopian hell-scapes? It sort of reminds one of Liberia a few decades earlier.

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  7. ” … collapsing state-run electricity grid, which relies on coal for 85% of its generation capacity.”
    CHECK

    ” … the country’s electricity, has long been plagued by government corruption, cronyism, and mismanagement”
    CHECK

    ” … as a result of political meddling and cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles to approving new contracts, some … are left in the dark for up to 15 hours a day.” (is that all? … amateurs!)
    CHECK

    ” … poultry farmers were forced to cull 10 million chickens because abattoirs couldn’t function amid constant power cuts.”
    CHECK

    ” … the failing power grid is having a big impact on domestic productivity. But economic output is also being curtailed by yet more crumbling infrastructure: the railway system.”
    oh, you better believe CHECK

    “The system … is in such bad shape due to years of government underinvestment and corruption that companies are having to turn to alternate transport systems – like trucking goods … “
    CHECK

    “This dysfunction of the freight system is a catastrophe”
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    & the ‘solution’??? … “why is the government so hesitant to give up any control of these state-owned enterprises and let the markets do their thing? “Given the history of apartheid [white supremacy] and particularly the neglect of poor Black and working-class communities,” Stuurman says, “there’s a fear that inequality would be exacerbated if and when privatization of electricity generation and supply comes into force.”

    man, you couldn’t print a better future scenario for what’s about to happen in the USA

    Ammo up! & FJB

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  9. It is so appropriate that this comes out during Black History Month. It perfectly fits their narrative that everything is about race, and that whites have perpetually suppressed the blacks.

    Blacks that didn’t appreciate what their white countrymen did for them and ‘cleansed’ them out of their own homes deserve to live in their self-made black hole (ooooh, that’s so rayciss!).

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  11. Shouldn’t be a problem, since we are told that black African slaves built America. So those black South Africans should be able to build just a great a civilization there too, right?

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  12. My neighbor 2 doors down from SA moved his family here 2 years ago. He has a farm that he left in care to his black foreman. The foreman is running the farm and is smart enough to know to take instructions from my neighbor to run the farm. He and his wife do not work. They get profits from the farm in SA and live very well in NE ATL. The first year they were here the local HS did away with the February African American King and Queen. The boy’s platform was that he was born in Africa…

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  14. That’s what happens when all the Brits and Boers move out.
    If slaves built America, why did the British Empire have to import East Indians to build that railroad, the one over the Tsavo gorge?

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