Historical roots of electricity crisis
Today South Africa’s economy and its ability to attract foreign investment has been hobbled by the ANC’s abuse of Eskom as a vote-catching tool.
EDITOR – Besides her penchant for political invective, deputy mayor Nomvuso Shabalala’s historical understanding of the electricity crisis is deeply flawed (Mercury, January 30).
In 1994, three out of five households had electricity (Pottinger, The Mbeki Legacy, p 235).
That achievement was way in excess of any independent African state. But what needs to be appreciated is that the extent of electrification was dependent on economic factors which, as in the USA, were determined by population density, affordability and technical maintenance capacity. Race and ideology played no part.
In the USA, rural electrification received a jumpstart in 1935 as part of president Roosevelt’s New Deal programme.
But it made very slow progress because of the tremendous costs involved. As a result, the pace of rural electrification came to depend on GDP growth, as Lorenzo Pellegrini and Luca Tasciotti show in a 2012 Forum for Development Studies paper. It was thanks to the surge in the US economy from World War 2 that enabled rural electrification to increase from 50% in 1942 to 95% complete by 1960.
Matters were different in South Africa.Thanks to ANC-inspired international sanctions, disinvestment and strikes, by 1991 our economy had contracted by 25%. Thus, the ANC inherited an economy in a troubled state. Despite that, it indulged in a great leap forward in electrification. It prioritised a socialist, populist vision ahead of economic and technical realities. Within eight years, three million new customers were added without considering the ability of poor rural recipients to pay or the capacity of Eskom to deliver.
The result was that by 2007 bad debts were costing Eskom R1,5 billion a year while illegal connections into the grid had become rampant. Yet the ANC government insisted that the energy regulator, Nersa, kept power pricing at unrealistically low levels.
ANC cadre deployment to key Eskom positions accelerated the degradation of the utility in terms of capacity to supply and maintenance.
As far back as 2007 only two of the country’s power stations were reaching optimum output levels. Then came the Koeberg shut-down in 2008, which was entirely related to poor maintenance, and the fiasco of so-called load shedding. Despite having increased energy requirements by more than 50% since taking office and despite the deterioration in Eskom’s capacity to meet power demands, in 2008 the ANC government continued to equivocate about the funding of Eskom’s long overdue expansion programme.
Today South Africa’s economy and its ability to attract foreign investment has been hobbled by the ANC’s abuse of Eskom as a vote-catching tool. The irony, however is that the very people the ANC sought to impress through electrification are suffering as the economy stagnates.
Deputy mayor Shabalala needs to recognise that history is life’s teacher.
COUNCILLOR DUNCAN DU BOIS
