{"id":82008,"date":"2023-08-31T06:00:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T20:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=82008"},"modified":"2023-08-30T16:29:39","modified_gmt":"2023-08-30T06:29:39","slug":"south-africas-power-failures-are-a-symptom-of-a-deeper-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/south-africas-power-failures-are-a-symptom-of-a-deeper-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa\u2019s power failures are a symptom of a deeper disease"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s been so bad that it has even flickered across Western screens recently as one of those brief human-interest stories. The lights have gone out in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Eskom, the state-owned power utility, has imposed severe \u2018load-shedding\u2019 on the country, switching off<\/a> parts of the grid for many hours a day because of \u2018severely constrained<\/a>\u2019 generation capacity.<\/p>\n

For those who are living it, there\u2019s little opportunity to skim to the next story. It\u2019s less a human-interest piece than a slug in the solar plexus, materially and emotionally. That\u2019s the mild version. The growing number of doomsday prophets see it as the apocalypse, or part of it\u2014the beginning of South Africa\u2019s long-expected death spiral.<\/p>\n

Certainly, an already-bilious economy has taken a sickening hit. Five percent<\/a> was lopped off GDP growth by load-shedding in 2022\u2014and halfway through 2023, there were already more<\/a> power cuts than in all of last year. The economy contracted<\/a> in the last quarter of 2022 and narrowly avoided a repeat in the first quarter of this year. Forecasts for 2023 range between 0.1% and 0.3% growth.<\/p>\n

There has been no shortage of mellifluous masterplans and roads to recovery. Following on from President Cyril Ramaphosa\u2019s declaration of a \u2018national state of disaster<\/a>\u2019 in February, government ministers and Eskom executives have become expert in the art of death by PowerPoint<\/a>, if nothing else. The latest magic bullet is the announcement<\/a> of a number of cooperative deals with Chinese power companies. Most South Africans have taken such assurances with a spadeful of salt.<\/p>\n

But the notion that Eskom has inaugurated the country\u2019s end times is simplistic. South Africa\u2019s power crisis is more a national analogy than an apocalypse, the manifestation of a deeper malaise that has metastasised and is becoming more visible to the naked eye. The cancer in the body politic is catching up with it.<\/p>\n

The roots of Eskom\u2019s troubles lie in the period shortly after the end of apartheid. In the 1990s, as access to the grid was ramped up in formerly segregated black areas, Nelson Mandela\u2019s government was warned repeatedly<\/a> that electricity demand would outstrip supply by 2007 if new power stations weren\u2019t built. Nothing was done; instead, a ban was placed on the construction of generators until 2004. And, lo and behold, the country plunged into its first round of load-shedding in late 2007. Within three months, US$6 billion had been wiped from the economy\u2019s bottom line.<\/p>\n

Superficial improvement after 2008 disguised an ongoing slide in the background. Poor planning was\u2014or, more precisely, continued to be\u2014conjoined to a haemorrhaging of human resources and systemic corruption. An urgent emphasis<\/a> on racial transformation displaced a critical bloc<\/a> of experienced managers and technicians, substituting it not with the most capable black alternatives but with the most politically connected.<\/p>\n

The effects were both linear and exponential. The ability to maintain and build infrastructure plummeted in keeping with the loss of corporate memory and experience, while sleaze magnified the impacts. In 2011, a turbine at a major power station blew apart<\/a> when an automatic cut-off system failed and there was no one in the control room to flick the switch manually; 600 megawatts of capacity, enough to power a city of half a million people, was sliced<\/a> off the grid. Three years later, a furnace at the same plant exploded when a basic ignition sequence was mistakenly reversed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those were just two of the more spectacular incidents that highlighted the unremitting corrosion of operational capacity occurring beyond public view. Meanwhile, corrupt coal contracts<\/a> leached hundreds of millions from Eskom\u2019s coffers and resulted in the delivery of substandard product, damaging generators<\/a> and causing more load-shedding. Stop-gap, emergency measures like diesel generators cost the utility nearly five times more<\/a> per kilowatt hour, produced less electricity and opened a door to yet further corruption<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Construction of two new showpiece power plants began in 2007, but they are still not fully functional<\/a>,<\/u> 15 years down the track, and are billions over budget. One was completed in 2019, five years late, but was knocked out of action shortly after by a blast that resulted from \u2018management failures<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Ramaphosa\u2019s accession to the presidency in 2018, replacing the notoriously corrupt Jacob Zuma, raised hopes of a turnaround at Eskom and elsewhere, but his redemptive impact has been indiscernible. Eskom\u2019s latest CEO, Andre de Ruyter, resigned in early 2023 after blowing the whistle on criminal syndicates that had effectively taken over power stations and whose reach extended from the lowliest employees<\/a> to the deputy president<\/a>. De Ruyter has also alleged that the intelligence service was deployed<\/a> against him when he was investigating the rot. Unsurprisingly, he hasn\u2019t been thanked by the government, but instead threatened with legal action<\/a> for publishing a tell-all book\u2014a mere fleabite after having survived an attempted arsenic poisoning<\/a> the day after he tendered his resignation.<\/p>\n

Eskom is a microcosm of South Africa\u2019s failures because its flaws are paralleled in every sector, at every level of society. The problem begins at the top but doesn\u2019t end there. Just as Mandela\u2019s administration was warned time and again of the power-deficit bear-trap\u2014and then fell right into it\u2014the African National Congress has ignored the lessons post-liberation Africa had taught ad nauseum, beginning in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

As the inheritor of the last country to free itself of white rule, the ANC was not short of poor examples. It abdicated the opportunity to lead, instead submitting itself as a vehicle for instant gratification: it rewarded comrades from the struggle with patronage (the first priority) while splurging in the early days on populist promises (a subsidiary concern), just as Robert Mugabe and others had done to its north. In the process, both elements, patronage and populism, corrupted the process of Africanisation, prioritising speed and political orientation over capacity. Layers of perverse incentives have multiplied, creating a socioeconomic \u2018operating system\u2019 that rewards criminality, small and large, and penalises the diligent, black and white.<\/p>\n

But this is not simply a tale of malfeasance, lawlessness and the gradual erosion of the common good. That would be to mistake symptom for cause, just as it would be to place the country\u2019s woes at Eskom\u2019s doorstep. Significant philosophical threads run through it all. A vast overestimation of apartheid\u2019s capitalist fat reserves is one of them. Power stations weren\u2019t built, the comrades were allowed to loot, and poorly equipped managers were appointed to complex roles because it was assumed that there was more than enough to go around\u2014that the coffers could comfortably absorb the losses. It\u2019s the same outlook that led to de Ruyter\u2014against a backdrop in which Eskom\u2019s debt<\/a> had ballooned from US$2 billion in 2007 to US$25 billion in 2020\u2014being told<\/a> by a senior minister \u2018to be pragmatic \u2026 to enable some people to eat a little bit\u2019.<\/p>\n

An unwillingness to engage with the mechanics of development is another attitudinal root. In the minds of many, the road to economic transformation has always been redistributive rather than cumulative and generational. But South Africa\u2019s economy has never been large enough to reproduce white wealth via transfer, nor do such methods address the challenge of sustainability. Indeed, they war against it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been said<\/a> that Eskom is too big to fail. The same words have been used on many occasions of South Africa. But with size comes momentum. The disease that has ravaged it is too extensive for it not to fail. Measured against even the most modest hopes that greeted the advent of the ANC\u2019s rule, that has, in fact, already happened. The questions that remain are about the shape, rate and magnitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been so bad that it has even flickered across Western screens recently as one of those brief human-interest stories. The lights have gone out in South Africa. 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