Comment by Sacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sacho | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's imposible to divorce the effectiveness of government from global phenomenon and long-term knock-on effects from previous governments. For example, the brownout crisis - was it because the ANC government mismanaged funding and refused to repair, renew and build electrical power plants, or was it because the situation left by the apartheid government was unsustainable, and the ANC was left with a "you deal with it" post-it note? It's difficult to know without getting into the specifics of each issue.

My point is that comparing government effectiveness is not as easy as looking at results. This was exemplified by many of the communist satellite states to the USSR, which it sponsored for political gain to its own economic detriment. The satellite states flourished under communism, and as soon as the regime collapsed they suffered - was it the newly-elected democratic government's fault that industry had collapsed and there was rampant inflation, or was it just a long-term effect of previous government policy?

Fair point, but choosing the electricity crisis as an example is not helping your claim - the Apartheid lot left us with something like 50% overcapacity and almost the cheapest electricity in the world at the time. We actually have less electricity generating capacity right now than at that time. The lack of generting capacity has severely constrained our economy since. When the crisis first bit in the 2000s, many mines had to shut down for the first time in 200 years of continuous operations.

The government had an initial plan to redirect overcapacity in many areas (not just electricity) to rolling out services to those neglected by the Apartheid govt, and then after that to start building infrastructure again (not sure of specifics, maybe 5 years on?). The problem is that in most cases, this never happened. Hence the limits of most infrastructure are gradually being hit, with a knock-on effect for the economy.

If you have 50% overcapacity you have completely failed to plan your electricity system - that't not really a measure of success

It was a different time - my understanding is that having a multiply redundant system was important for an isolated pariah state. Think of it like the strategic petroleum reserves in certain isolated states of today. Of course none of that was necessary once SA rejoined the global community. This extra capacity could have been carefully mothballed for later use; instead we are now building 2x brand new coal stations, each of which will be the largest coal plants in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com