South Africa’s Collapse Finally Came When its Electricity Utility Eskom Failed

South Africa’s Collapse Finally Came When its Electricity Utility Eskom Failed. By Helen Andrews.

Could the collapse of South Africa, so long foretold by pessimists, finally be arriving? The United States government thinks it’s possible.

On February 15, the U.S. embassy in Pretoria advised Americans in South Africa to have at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food, water, medicine, and hygiene supplies in case of power outages, which have reached record levels in recent weeks, leaving users across the country without electricity for hours at a time. In January, the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council held a meeting, which was leaked to journalists in an audio recording, to discuss the need to prepare for a total collapse of South Africa’s power grid. …

Electricity could be the pillar that finally brings the Rainbow Nation tumbling to the ground.

Why Eskom? Because it sits at the intersection of the three themes of South Africa’s long decline: politics, incompetence, and crime.

Politics is what prevented Eskom from raising rates throughout the late 1990s and mid-2000s, when it badly needed revenue in order to build new power stations and replace old ones. Cheap electricity was seen as a perk of post-apartheid freedom …

Many South Africans simply refuse to pay their electricity bills, which is also a political problem. There is no way the ruling party would permit Eskom to cut off the vast majority of Soweto residents (around 80 percent) who don’t pay. …

Eskom is subject to aggressive diversity targets under Black Economic Empowerment laws. In 1995, its senior management was mandated to go from 70 percent white to 50 percent black by 1999 and 75 percent black by 2005. In 2008, Eskom’s head of human resources announced, “Over the next five years…Eskom has to appoint two new staff every day, and it is adamant that one of them will be a black woman.”

These targets were replicated across all sectors of the South African economy, and everywhere they have had the same effect: incompetence. Anthea Jeffery’s Bee: Helping or Hurting? documents multiple instances where people died because hospital administrators or water inspectors hired due to affirmative action were not qualified for their jobs. …

The fundamental problem that makes Eskom’s situation so intractable … is that “you can’t post a policeman over every employee’s shoulder to watch what he’s doing.” Sabotage and theft are often invisible. The effort needed to turn around such a widespread problem would be massive, requiring support not only from management at all levels but from law enforcement, politicians, and bureaucrats. That is why it is unlikely to happen.

I’m wearing my shocked face. No one could have predicted this.

hat-tip Stephen Neil