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Comment by rsmckinney | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what sort of shift happened in recent history such that S Africa is now a region where “electricity supply is erratic or non-existent.”

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The article mentions southern Africa, a region, not South Africa, the country.

In the past, only privileged few used to have access to electricity in Southern Africa. Now almost everyone has access to electricity within two decades of ending of apartheid/colonisation. Having access to electricity is no longer a luxury for the privileged few. Electriticity infrastructure was built to provide electricity to privileged few. That's the biggest shift. By the way, I have access to electricity everyday and it isn't erratic.

Source -> I live in South Africa. Since 1982.

> Electriticity infrastructure was built to provide electricity to privileged few

What group of people built the "electricity infrastructure" you now enjoy? And if they hadn't built it, do you think you would have access to dependable electricity right now?

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Especially not race war.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All groups of people found in South Africa were involved in building the infrastructure that I am using and paying for. Beside, that shouldn't even matter because it was state's resources which were used. Even now, it is state resources which are being used to build electricity infrastructure to replace the old.

What matters is that now the infrastructure is built for all group of people. In 5 years'time, the infrastructure will be completely new [1]. But still, no group of people should claim that they did us a favour by using state's resources to build the infrastructure. It is their job to provide electricity for all citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Sout...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskom#Power_shortage:_2007_-_o...

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