South Africa is enduring “load-shedding” for the third consecutive week, as Eskom, the public electricity company, has had to acknowledge major problems with maintenance and power generation capacity as the country enters the summer months.
Worse still, the company announced that “Stage 2” load-shedding would have to be “Stage 4” load-shedding instead, bringing major disruptions to companies and households still struggling to bring the economy back from the brink in the pandemic.
Twenty years ago, South African enjoyed the cheapest energy in the world, amid talk of privatizing Eskom. But the left — the intellectuals, the trade unions, and the South African Communist Party — opposed privatization on principle. Moreover, the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), found Eskom a convenient target for its practice of “cadre deployment,” under which political operatives could be placed in key positions and cronies could be rewarded with well-remunerated jobs.
Meanwhile, aggressive policies of affirmative action, aimed at the “transformation” of South Africa, resulted in an exodus of skilled and experienced engineers, leaving Eskom and South African industry generally short of necessary human capital.
South Africa’s Business Day recently reported that Eskom is also short of cash, according to Chief Operating Officer Jan Oberholzer: “Eskom needs R11bn [about $750 million] a year for maintenance, which is budgeted for, and outages must be planned two years in advance, Oberholzer said. But cash to perform the maintenance was insufficient and only R6bn was made available by the finance department, some of which was too late to make full use of during the financial year.”
South Africa imports power from other African countries, but Zambia was not able to produce the necessary electricity supply this weekend, the Business Day reported.
There have been power cuts in nine of the eleven months of 2021 thus far.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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