South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen
news24.com
news24.com
My understanding is that what happened is, in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped; of course it was in many ways an evil government, but it was also a surprisingly competent one, the only government to produce nuclear weapons and decide on their own to dismantle them or something? So anyway, all their plans for much-needed energy infrastructure upgrades were scrapped in 1994, and never considered again until the rolling blackouts started, by which time it was far too late. Since then the nearly universal corruption within the ANC and overall state capture meant things rapidly got worse, not better.
I distinctly remember writing code to do periodic saves of a long running computation's state, because the power would just randomly go out, and at one point the power went out while saving the state, so I switched to saving A/B alternating state files.
Most of my family is still hanging out in SA and things just get worse and worse... don't even get me started on the crime...
I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood.
Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).
Yeah, if you're willing to look the other way and lock your car doors in literally the most unequal country in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...
And since you're also a Saffer, I don't need to say anything about the daily threat from crime, and how everyone lives basically in a castle with electric fences. Do you have electric fences and private security? Of course, just like all the other white people in South Africa. Afrikaans was my first language, I know how it is over there.
Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", having lived in so many countries (including Poland, Czechia, Germany, NZ, England, ...).
Sure, but isn't private security and gated living (AKA security fences) becoming the norm in most of the middle-class suburbs in many other countries?
> Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live",
Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant, but my understanding is that, even if I move to another country, I'm still going to live in a secure place anyway, only it will be much smaller and more expensive, both at the same time.
No. Even in the US, I wouldn't say gated communities are the norm, and at least from what I've seen of what SA houses look like, they're vastly more serious about security than gated communities in the states.
Sure[1], which is why I periodically check what standard of living I can expect if I emigrate to any of the countries I've visited.
I'm frequently shocked that in places like the US it is considered normal to have a 30yr mortgage (I took a 15 year one, and am on track to pay it of in 10 years).
[1] High level of crime, low level of service delivery, shortage of opportunities for my kids, etc. I'm not blind, you know.
Check the historical interest rates of the US/UK vs SA for why that exists.
I moved to small town in Canada on the outskirts of Toronto. Literally nobody here locks the door, ever. They don't lock their cars, they regularly forget or leave their keys in their car. They definitely don't begin to have my habit of locking doors when you stop at an intersection.
There's more crime in other parts of Canada of course, and I enforce a bit stricter security in my own house due to my background, but honestly? Much of Canada is almost as nice as stereotype would portray it.
Again, not to say it's wonderful all the time for everybody everywhere in Canada ; it's not and I try to check my definite privilege. But I don't think people here really understand what "high crime levels" really means, on a world wide scale, and I don't think I've really seen a real gated community let alone anything like electric fence, outside of US embassy in Ottawa.
FWIW I lived in Winnipeg and various parts of Toronto, worked in Ottawa and Nova Scotia, visited Saskatchewan and Quebec. There are bad neighbourhoods for sure but it's not pervasive and bad neighbourhoods here are better than brilliant neighbourhood in some places I've lived.
I'd love this; what, in your opinion, are the odds that a 46yo (myself) with a wife and toddler and MiL and cats and dogs getting into Canada?
If I am already remotely working for a SA company? For a company in some other country?
I really don't mind living outside of popular areas if I am remotely employed anyway.
Canada is actively supporting Immigration. Unlike our neighbours, pretty much all mainstream political parties across the spectrum acknowledge our need to bring fresh blood in (though we are getting more and more extremist parties which are seeing more success). But as to chances of any individual case? I'm sorry I haven't a foggiest idea. It's a point system and a long grind and lots of luck. You never know until you try, and my advice like with everything else is don't put all your eggs in one basket - there's new Zealand and Scandinavian countries and million other places I'd be happy to live in.
I suspect small town life is similar in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand: safe (unlocked), possible to fit in, and the best place to bring up kids. My sister moved to a rural area and brought her kids up there and it was a great decision for everyone, versus my city (Christchurch, 400k people, okay but not great for kids IMHO - disclaimer: no kids!). I have no idea what to say if you are seeking city life.
My gut feeling would be to suggest Australia is the most likely best fit. But you should be able to find something that suits your situation and personalities in any of those three countries, if your desires are smart.
You really need to talk with friends and acquaintances that have moved - especially ones that were in your situation but are now decades later down that path.
Not anywhere I can think of in Europe or Australia.
I can understand your point though, if you're used to something it's difficult to change your lifestyle and that's true on both the positives and negatives. Someone used to living in a safe country wouldn't imagine exchanging that safety for a larger house. If you're used to the crime and have not lived anywhere safer then you do not see it as much of a negative. But once you have a large house with a bunch of stuff in it, it's difficult to imagine getting rid of some of the items and live somewhere smaller.
I feel like this is a huge exaggeration. I'm extremely far from an expert, but I'm in SA (right now) surfing and it's not that bad everywhere. Cape Town and the bigger cities felt like that, but I went through a bunch of small surfing towns/villages/suburbs and stayed in a bunch of places that didn't have electric fences.
They did have a sticker saying they paid for some security company, but that was it.
The inequality is absolutely disgusting though, I agree. It's such a shame, because it's such an amazing country.
Staying here longer definitely crossed my mind, so I see what people mean by quality of life. The food is amazing, amazing surfing and hiking spots, amazing wild-life, the list goes on and on. I really wish it was possible to fix the inequality, but I can't even begin to imagine what that would involve. I did my best to tip well, but obviously that makes no difference at the macro level.
It's not possible to do that, because the government is fairly and democratically elected[1], and the voters who keep supporting this government are too short-sighted to see that trying to vote themselves more handouts doesn't work in the long run.
[1] When a government stays in power for almost 3 decades, all the while being fairly elected by the voters, and the voters suffer because of it, who exactly are you going to blame? What exactly will you "fix"?
Ignoring the obvious massive disparity you are glossing over here I have perhaps a less antagonistic question.
Do you have to spend a lot on security? Some of these houses look like compounds with wire fences and huge gates etc.
I’m remember the coverage of the Pistorious trial showing all that etc.
In Pretoria I would only consider living in a security estate, Oscar lived in Silver Lakes which is one on the east side of town. All of these estates have walls, electric fences and armed security guards with access controls that require a remote or one time code etc.. Most houses inside of the security estates have very little if any security measures such as alarms etc. because the crime inside is generally petty low. These estates are very similar to US HOA's with architectural standards, many have pools, common ares, golf courses etc.. The levies (monthly fees) are usually between $58 and $174 a month. Taxes seem to run about $100 a month for a $260k house and in Pretoria that can get you a 400 square meter house on a nice sized lot with premium finishes and a pool.
The Cape Town area seems to have higher taxes and what appears to be some community security that seems to even out to the same as what you would pay for a similar house (price-wise) in a security estate in Pretoria. The difference is that it appears that you can have enough coverage with cameras and beams in the parts I've been looking at, though many choose to have the electric fences for good measure and there are some security estates as well.
Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space.
Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.
Entertaining guests, large extended family, having enough space for both a pool table and a ping-pong table indoors, nice to have dedicated study (came in handy during pandemic), bedrooms are very generous so get used for more than sleeping (e.g. MiL's b/room has all her hobbies in it, jigsaw tables, crafts, etc).
People watch TV and kids play games, and they never disturb each other.
Large space is a component of standard of living; when I talk to people who've never lived in a large space, they can't imagine how their life would be improved by a large space.
Asking people "Why do you need a large house?" is like asking people "why do you need an SUV?[1]"
[1] The SUV is, IIRC, the most popular class of car sold in many countries (excluding commercial vehicles). People like nice things. I like nice houses.
700 sqm sound like an endless dusting and cleaning chore to me, unless you can afford to have servants.
Source: my parents are from South Africa
1. Transfer the majority of your legally earned savings in rand, on which you have already paid taxes, from your South African bank account to a South African coin exchange, using it to buy Bitcoin, or Dai, or Ethereum, or whatever. Since this is white-market money, KYC should be no problem, right?
2. Transfer your Bitcoin (etc.) to a wallet or wallets you control, maybe with multi-signature authorization, maybe using an Electrum seed phrase, etc. Presumably this is what an exchange is for, right? Buying Bitcoin and then sending it somewhere.
3. Move to New Zealand or the Netherlands or wherever your new job is.
Where does this plan fall down in practice today?
Private property rights are intact in South Africa (for now perhaps, but things are bad enough without the need for exaggeration). Also, monetary (exchange) control regulations are quite loose nowadays, and shouldn’t affect normal people trying to emigrate, but as you say, the exchange rate makes this a moot point.
No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.
> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?
It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.
> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
For example?
One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children.
So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?
(I'm German, in case that matters).
Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.
They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.
Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.
Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.
We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.
You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.
Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.
But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.
Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.
Edit: I have completely forget that whole Eastern Block was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan from political reasons and help from Soviets was not really there.
German socialists were rejecting cooperation with Soviet Communists as early as May 1945.
New authentic German parties were organized in June 1945. The CDU was organized (in the Soviet zone) by merging Catholic and Protestant parties that existed in Weimar Germany.
One of the earliest political controversies was whether the surviving July plotters (“Operation Valkyrie”) or Weimar politicians should lead the German people.
The Allied government preferred the Valkyrie plotters. They were sidelined by the politically experienced Weimar politicians.
The Soviets were holding semi-rigged German elections in September 1945. Austria had fair elections by November 1945.
The current German state (“West Germany”) came into existence in 1949. The occupational and autonomous German government existed hand in hand for six years.
It really is amazing how fast “normal politics” resumed in Germany.
South Korea. Took them a couple decades to get moving but once they did they took off like a rocket.
To rephrase the question: “is democracy an end itself, and not just a means to better government?”
South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. It has the raw ingredients to be a global economic powerhouse. What its government - and ostensibly the people voting for it - are doing to it is so sad to see.
Meanwhile the Netherlands thrive, despite barely even having land - most of what they have, they had to take from the sea. There are countless similar examples - it seems resources and land quality have precious little to do with prosperity.
Colonization is more an expression of prosperity, rather than its cause: to colonize, a country already has to be well developed and with a strong military and navy. Ask yourself: with Africa's resources and size, why didn't it colonize Europe, instead of the other way around?
South Africa was no “very productive economy”. The engine behind the “very productive economy” country was (almost) free labor.
People always fail to take that detail into account..
You should also remember that resources went to whites mostly during apartheid. That means around 1/5th of the population…
Fixing inequality is really hard
Newsflash to you though, there is plenty of cheap labour still floating around in SA.
Yet the productive are leaving in droves, whilst the racist (literally) black ruling class in power continue to steal and drive the country into nothingness, perpetually throwing out excuses like you are as to why it can't work now.
I can argue that Apple and the iPhone as a product range is riding on cheap labour from Asia. And so are many products the rich world depends on. Would you say the US is not really a productive country because of that?
The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.
I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…
Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do.
With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba).
Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand.
The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices.
With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician.
Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up.
The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well.
Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state.
South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue).
Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.
The line "The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well" even radically undersells just how much of a debacle these two power stations have been. They were supposed to be the 8th/9th biggest coal stations in the world & accurately sized to solve the pending shortages in time, the major contracts went to legitimate companies like Alstom, GE & Hitachi. They were supposed to take approx. 5 years from 2007 and cost a reasonable approx. R30 billion each.
What's actually happened is that 15 years later neither is fully operational and the money spent has crossed 10x the original plans. The parts of the stations that currently do work are hamstrung by massive and debilitating design flaws that regularly cause trips or bigger issues (e.g. a smoke stack collapse last month) and there is no clear end for the construction in site even after all this time & money. And these aren't complex nuclear plants - these are just standard coal power stations. How to build them is quite well understood by now!
It's a combination of sustained and massive corruption (every now and then the current administration finds a few extra billion to recoup from a corrupt contractor), poor original designs that have complicated every subsequent step in the waterfall chart and finally unfortunate incompetence (for instance one of the 6 units at Medupi was entirely blown up after hydrogen wasn't vented before maintenance. The entire generator room must now be replaced with new parts from France at the cost of multiple billions of rands and over a year and a half of additional delay).
Finally, w.r.t. the reforms mention in parent comment's final line - I think they have a chance. South Africa has previously had a radically regulated energy sector. Basically you couldn't generate your own power, period. But due to the pressing political weight of the current situation there have been increasing steps away from the ideological commitment to exclusively state run coal powered grid. Large energy users and businesses can now do paperwork for approval to run their own multi-megawatt stations and basically every big factory, mine, mill etc. is now doing this to varying degrees. The big mining houses especially will spend a lot of money building their own infrastructure now. Between allowing the grid to buy private power (a lot of which is affordably priced renewable energy) and a lot of heavy demand starting to make its own power I think there's a fair chance things will stabilize in the next 2 years. The big question is electoral conferences and the next elections. If EFF wins meaningful electoral power there is a strong chance SA will go the route of Venezuela quicker than people think - and I say that as someone who is very committed to staying here and doesn't subscribe to most of the negative takes people can have about SA.
It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme.
I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy.
[1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector.
[2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?member...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_S...
My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants, who use it to get to their final destination (usually Australia).
(Canada serves a similar function for those seeking to move to the US.)
Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0].
Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that.
And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesst...
Sorry, I meant "usual gateway for South African emigrants who can't get into Australia directly". I am aware that Australia is the #1 destination.
For the uninitiated, "load shedding" is a euphemism for "rolling blackouts". According to the wiki, Stage 4 load shedding leaves 25% of grid users without power. Assuming "several stages above stage 4" means Stage 7, that would mean that, at any given point, ~45% of grid users would be without power. [0]
Yikes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis#Lo...
Due to how long these power cuts have persisted a lot of businesses, industry and the middle class & up have almost habituated to the levels up to 4. Shopping centers have generators, business parks have full solar and retail stores have battery backup. For instance a local clothing chain (Foschini) installed 300+ Tesla powerwall setups so that all their locations can be totally uninterrupted even with 2.5/5/7.5 hours per day of power cuts. Cell towers, fiber infrastructure, hospitals, even traffic lights at busy intersections all have battery backup these days.
The reason this announcement is making the news is because levels above 4, like the two weeks or so of stage 6 we recently had are much more problematic. You start to run into issues where cell tower batteries can only charge like 80% back up with the number of hours powered per day - and so after a few days they no longer have enough charge to keep up with the interruptions and go offline, disrupting communications & internet access.
Additionally the provisions heavy industry has made over the years to deal with this become insufficient and you start to lose shifts and thus there's a lot of evidence the economy is very materially affected at these levels of cuts.
Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor and disrupts job growth when it's desperately needed, curtails foreign and local investment etc. To discuss how parts of society can easily function with the lower stages of power cuts is not to miss how insane this all is... A society of 60 million people has largely stood by while this has happened for approx. 15 years now. And it's not like this is a matter of a poor nation without the ability to invest - approximately $40 billion USD has been spent by the power utility just in capex alone in this period - and afterwards they are producing less power than at the start... Quote from a local article: "It means that Eskom destroyed 46 GWh of power generation per R1 billion spent on increasing its power generation." [1]
[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/465641-eskom-blew-r...
And every little business having its own diesel generator is just like building more power stations, but much dirtier and less efficient...
Of course it's not the biggest crisis because grid-level electricity usage spikes overwhelmingly at morning and evening peaks. So if you can use the power cut schedules to shift demand away from these peaks, even if the batteries reduce the efficiency a bit, you're still having a substantial effect on the required peak grid power.
Since those batteries aren't 100% efficient, a fair amount of this power is probably being lost to the batteries themselves.
Accordingly there have been big govt. subsidies for geyser timers to put on your DB and solar geysers to try reduce this effect. Big information campaigns about not running the geyser all the time etc.
The consequences can be substantial, the city electricity depts. have to continually deal with substations and local transformers blowing up (literally, in an explosion, I've seen the aftermath!) because of the demand surges. Some areas are exempted from the scheduled cuts in my city to preserve older infrastructure.
Additionally, insurance companies report big spikes in claims from devices being damaged due to the unstable power as it reconnects. In my house everything is behind varying levels of surge protection, and interestingly I actually have SA made surge plugs that don't pass power through for the first 5 minutes after powering back on. This way my fridge compressor won't be damaged by unstable power (e.g. sudden substantially lower voltage, or a surge) as the scheduled cut ends.
Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.
What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.
Strawman, the options are not "apartheid or corruption", because the party that treated them as third-class citizens doesn't exist anymore.
You're presenting a false equivalence here, but I'm not sure what point your dishonesty is supposed to make.
> What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights?
Then you have the SAPP[3] where nations in Southern Africa have interconnected grids. E.g. Namibia[4] is impacted by South Africa's blackouts, but not to the point of their own supply shortages mirroring Eskom's outages, and they're planning to become independent.
So if a country of 2.5 million to your north can run their own semi-connected grid, can't parts of South Africa form their own local experiments in grid management using their own tax base?
I've got no idea how hard that would be to pull off politically, but presumably easier than "convince the entire country not to vote for the ANC", or "full independence for the Cape" etc. We're only talking about energy infrastructure.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_South_African_general_ele...
2. https://osm4wiki.toolforge.org/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?proj...
4. https://www.observer24.com.na/load-shedding-in-sa-lowers-nam...
> Between 2007 and 2021, Eskom invested R680 billion to increase its generation capacity. However, after this huge investment, Eskom produced less power than when it started.
The power plants started in 2007 with initial budgets of R79 billion and R81 billion and were due to be completed in 2012 and 2014. Neither are fully operational, produce far less than the design capacity of 4800MW, have significantly overrun their budgets (R145 B and R161 B respectively), and require another R33 B to finish! Is this all corruption or ???
edit: Here's another article: https://archive.ph/LctJi . tl;dr: mismanagement, corruption, and a very long history of pricing power below cost and borrowing to cover. Plus handouts to inefficient coal suppliers creating that bad cost structure that wasn't passed on to buyers.
> "If we continue to burn diesel the way we have for the past seven months, the cost would be astronomical. But we do not have the cash to spend. We would be able to pay if the *municipalities were paying us*,"
That, right there, is a pretty big reason for the current blackouts: The masses refuse to pay, and the cost of keeping society afloat falls to a minority who cannot really be squeezed any further.
Last I checked (2007), each taxpayer was supporting 4.3 people other than their dependents or themselves.
It is not a sustainable situation, and the state should have been doing everything it could to encourage foreign investment. Instead, empowered by the voters, they repeatedly loot the coffers.
[0] https://scroll.in/article/943564/does-not-tyranny-spring-fro...
Any South African currently living there is completely unsurprised by this latest news.
Sorry for my rant :(
Edit: Removed the part describing Kagame as genocidal because I mixed up his identity. He's still corrupt and power-drunk though.
1- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
A couple of ultra-rich oil tycoons in an otherwise poor country will artificially increase the per capita figure.
A couple of ultra-rich people can't really move GDP per capita figures anywhere; that's not how averages work.
How many are, for example, the Saudi princes? Five thousand or so?
We can do a thought experiment -- let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million? No, because part of that $100 million is taking money away from other uses, e.g. someone with a fixed entertainment budget going to see her instead of doing something else. Only the resulting increase in overall income -- if any -- is the measure of how much Taylor adds to GDP.
GDP is the sum of total final production in an economy, and while a billionaire may play an important role in organizing production and encouraging more production to happen, it's usually the case that if they were never born or left, the economy would continue with other replacements for the billionaire's contribution. The replacements would be less efficient and so output would be a bit smaller. That difference is the contribution to GDP, not the billionaire's entire income.
And if you talk about Saudi oil princes, then they are not producing anything at all. Make those Oil princes disappear, and Saudi Arabia's GDP would be unchanged. Actually it would certainly increase, since imports subtract from GDP and those oil princes like to stash their wealth overseas and import luxury goods.
Bottom line, please don't confuse household income with national income, they are different beasts, and you cannot increase or decrease national income in a material way by adding or removing rich households to the country, anymore than you can make a business increase or decrease in revenue by paying the CEO more. Rather, CEOs of high revenue companies earn more, and those of lower revenue companies earn less. You can't just look at a company that is earning less revenue and say "Oh, just add a few thousand highly paid executives to the company, and the revenue will be way up".
This does occasionally happen, and by choosing your definition of "elite" carefully enough you can make it happen in more cases, but it is generally not the case. Poor countries generally have much greater inequality than wealthy countries, with the result that elites in poor countries (say, top 1%, 5%, or 10% by either net worth or income) are often wealthier than elites in richer countries.
> let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million?
Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost". Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it. If she spends it all immediately on domestic products and services, then yes, she does increase GDP by her earnings, because her spending replaces the forgone spending you correctly identify on the part of her fans. Similarly if she lends it to businesses who use it to buy domestic products and services, or if she buys their stock from them or from other shareholders who then go on to use it in the same way. So-called "entertainers" tend to be quite spendthrift, and those from the US mostly spend their money in the US.
To some degree Ms. Swift is an exception on this count, known for her wise investing, estimates are that she's grown her net worth to only US$450 million over her 18-year music career, despite currently earning US$150 million per year from her work; as a very rough approximation that means she's spent the first 15 of her 18 years of showbiz earnings already, and most of her savings are probably also in US stock markets and money markets.
This is false, and massively so. Look here: https://ceoworld.biz/2020/02/07/how-much-the-top-1-of-worlds...
The relationship between Gini and GDP is complex and the correlations are small. The top 1% of poor countries like Haiti or Bangladesh are not richer than the top 1% of the US, they are much poorer, because even if the lorenz curve is such that 1% of the population get 40% of the income in one place and 30% in another -- which is a huge change -- it does not change the fact that one of these has a GDP of $800 per capita, and the other of $70,0000. This is really just math and an understanding of the definitions, plus a rough understanding of the possible differences in Lorenz curves (hint: in poor countries, there just isn't that much of a surplus for the wealthy to accumulate and Lorenz curves don't vary that much).
> Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost".
Also false. Gross Domestic Output is usually 150% of Gross Domestic product, and then market income varies much more because NIPA (National Income Product Accounts) throws away spending on purchase and sale of assets, nor does it care about moving money around, but it tries to focus purely on net addition of domestic production, with appropriate netting for intermediate inputs. Here are the definitions - https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook. National income and product accounts can be a little confusing, but it's not too hard and you do need to know what GDP is before getting into discussions about it.
Here is a brief summary: GDP is production of final goods services in a region. If an island that produces fish has 1000 billionaires move to it. Then the GDP of the island only increases by the number of extra fish that are produced to feed the billionaires when they live there. Once you understand this point, and stop thinking that the billionaires are somehow adding to the island's GDP with their billions, then you will have an idea of what GDP actually is, and then you will have a better intuition for the methods of measuring a billionaire's contribution to GDP. But it does take some study because GDP, as an economic concept, tries to measure actual production of final output, and is not a measure of market income at all.
> Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it.
Yes, because I do not double count. You can measure final output by looking at what everyone earns from producing goods with appropriate netting, or you can measure final output by looking at what people spend on the purchase of other's production, again with appropriate netting, but it is really double counting to do both at the same time. We are talking about how much Taylor Swift produces. Her purchase of other people's production doesn't get added to her own production. That is their production and they deserve the credit for doing it, whether that is equipment for recording studios, marketing people, construction workers maintaining venues, all those others involved in the music business who also contribute to GDP, not just Taylor Swift. And if she retired, they would work for someone else, continuing to produce. Similarly, when Taylor buys someone else's production, that does not add to her own production, it is the production of whoever produced that good. If Taylor likes fine cuisine, then cooks are the ones adding to GDP when she buys their food. GDP is a measure of production in an economy. We can change this and look at GDI, and try to measure income -- what people spend on production. In that case, we would only look at Taylor's spending, and we wouldn't look at her earnings at all. But what you want to avoid is doing both.
Nigeria's is 225 M.
That's the denominator difference.
I’m not perfect of course, so sometimes I do feel schadenfreude. But I never mistake it for a good thing, but rather a sign of my own imperfection.
[*edit] can someone downvoting explain what they disagree with here?
> in the real world is continents either being successful or failing
Hardly. Chile is quite successful while Argentina is kind of a mess and Bolivia is worse. Uruguay is doing well also. Brazil is doing reasonably well, all things considered too. Venezuela is an absolute mess.
Europe is a really mixed bag as well.
/me lifts hand and point finger to Botswanna.
There's plenty of factors that helped, I can think of a dozen right off the top of my head, but the one that made a crucial difference is in my opinion really the above.
Basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seretse_Khama#Presidency
South Africa also props Botswana up via a customs union.
https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...
Your numbers are not even close.
> In 2019, the GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) was $36,701 in Lithuania, $35,853 in Estonia and $30,830 in Latvia.
Source: https://wedc.org/export/market-intelligence/posts/strong-gro...
Botswana has a $7,347.55 GDP per capita according to Google (in 2021).
That's at least 75% lower than the worst Baltic nation, not "slightly below."
It's probably best compared to something like Qatar, where the hope is it'll be able to use the diamond wealth to found another industry.
I am not sure after covid and the war in Tigray how it's doing at the moment
No African country has ever done a "Japan" and come even close to catching up with the West. Hell, I don't think any has even been able to catch up with middle income countries. I am starting to doubt it can even be done.
Botswana - 12 Rwanda - 10 Ethiopia - 8.6 Kenya - 7.2 Burkina Faso - 6.9 Benin - 6.5 Zimbabwe - 6.3 South Sudan - 5.3 Uganda - 5.0 South Africa - 4.9
Compare: Japan - 1.6 USA - 5.6 Germany - 2.8 Korea - 4.0 Norway - 3.9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
The key question is: just how much of that nominal growth ended up back at the population, and how much ended up in anonymous Swiss accounts or shell companies belonging to autocrats and their families/friends?
when i grew up it was rare to see a homeless person, now there are tent camps all across the city. and i live in a red state where almost every local and state wide office is run by republicans.
My prefered theory is that human capital stays valuable even through crisis and that it pays of to be the direct cold conflict zone for two super powers, who then prop you up.
Japan is also example for itself. They voluntarily isolated themselves for centuries and fell back in everything. They were shocked when Americans forced them to trade in steam ships. But instead of finding excuses and blaming Americans for waking them up, they started Meiji restoration.
It's simply not the same thing.
Sure, China was forced to humiliating concession by the European.
But it's not the same. The borders of countries in Africa were drawn by Europeans.
For hundreds of years large parts of the continent was dominated by European colonialism.
If trade rights and relatively minor land concessions were considered humiliating by the Chinese... Just imagine
Reality is that no African majority country has ever been able to reach even middle income status. I suspect culture is the issue personally but until that fundamental fact changes all the people setting the bar at "Africa should develop" are making an assumption with no basis in reality.
The comparison is absurd.
It sounds like you even agree on this, Africa has never been a place with any degree of modern state capacity. It isn't surprising that it is still failing to achieve this.
Everyone in this thread is dancing around an extremely obvious but also extremely taboo point.
The PAP government loves to play the “we built this from nothing” story, and while they did do an amazing job of developing the country, they started on 2nd base.
It's a source of raw materials for powers outside of your continent, who pour money and arms into the hands of the cliques most willing and able to get those materials out of the country at the lowest price.
Any hint that a resource-cursed country wants to reign in its elites, regulate its environment or labor, or negotiate better prices is replied to with a torrent of funds directed to the people most willing to murder the reformers.
I think it's hard to build institutions, credibility and trust in a society.
This whole thread is making me feel like I'm in an alternative reality...
The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.
And of course, in the best traditions, divisions were sown where one set of Native people were marked as better than another set, in a move that takes many generations to heal.
My country (Ireland) was colonised, we lost half our population to famine and emigration. We, almost, lost our language, out culture. We still have sectarian conflict. We didn't have one quarter the shit that was done to many parts of Africa. And, without Europe's money, we would still be a state completely dependent on our former colonisers.
Healing will take time, but to not mention the damage done, and still being done there is nonsense.
The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
Our species is a violent one. The same can be said of other continents. Africa had the same problems long before America was hardly even a thing.
You could just as easily give counter examples of say gunboat diplomacy cracking open Japan and hurling it out of stasis and into modernity.
> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
You are not doing the people you purport sympathy for any favors with such an attitude.
Trains need to run, electric grids need to work. The observation on competency in no way implies endorsement of the previous government.
People are objectively worse off now, believe it or not (look into it before arguing), while you get to moralize from far away. Nobody is arguing for a return to the previous regime obviously.
What you're doing simply isn't helpful.
I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with reading comprehension, but if you're suggesting that I'm an Apartheid apologist for trying to explain how things got the way they are and how it's completely on-brand mismanagement from the ANC government, you've got completely the wrong guy.
Religion played a part. The best selling book after the printing press emerged was the Bible and majority of book sales revolved around religious texts. There was money to be made from this so it spread.
The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_literacy_campaign
Before the campaign, the rate of illiteracy among city dwellers was 11% compared to 41.7% in the countryside
Without universal literacy a country can't escape corruption, it is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to move to to the next stage. Not so long ago most everyone most everywhere was an illiterate peasant, the first places to grow out of that got first mover advantage.
Actually it is more like 18th century in Austria-Hungary where compulsory school attendance (6 years long - just read, write, count) was established in 1774 School Reform under Empress Maria Theresa and the elementary school as I know it was established by The Imperial Elementary School Act (Reichsvolksschulgesetz) of 1869 standardized compulsory schooling as a whole and increased compulsory schooling from six to eight years.
Which is very nice history lesson, but does not answer the question of "why did European rulers even bothered with compulsory education at all".
But there is always willingness to blame everybody else.
Botswana. If you want to count the island nations, Cape Verde, Seychelles as well too.
There Are No Successful Black Nations | And the indignity and helplessness of blacks in America won’t end until we have a first-world African nation to lift up our people. <https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_ar...>
The infatuation with the "rainbow nation" and Mandela overcoming the evil apartheid government.
But the policies have just been a disaster. And in recent years, it's become so bad that we have to read news like this. Anyone that can get out, has or is getting out. I worked in a project with ppl from Johannesburg; suddenly they had moved to my country.
I work from home so invested in two 1000KW inverters with 100AH AGM batteries for powering my fibre and servers (it has battery banks at the POP) and looking at replacing them with LifePO batteries when the AGM ones die.
Some companies are selling a rent a solar conversion for your home - you just make do.
Sorry to hear the situation in lebanon is not great, I hope your situation improves.
I am reading about the Hubble S-120 drop in replacement batteries with their own BMS but I am reading conflicting reports.
I think the batteries in this case are "AOKLY LiFePO4 Battery ALFP-12100", also drop in replacement types, probably similar to the Hubble ones.
My email is in my bio if you have any follow up questions.
Diesel is expensive and normally only used for small scale generation when there aren't other options.
Where are the gas turbines? They're cheap, easy to install in just a few months, and can scale nearly limitlessly? They're not great for the environment, but far better than diesel.
Then there is also grid scale solar/wind/hydro, which take longer to deploy and have more caveats, but work out cheaper per kWh.
Eskom's OCGTs are combined cycle, meaning they can run on either diesel or gas, but historically it's been cheaper and easier in terms of supply to use diesel.
Those are also the ideas that work, whether they are applied in Europe or in Africa.
Jacob Zuma came to power partially because he wasn't an AIDS denialist, and one of the few things Zuma can claim credit for was widespread availability of anti-AIDS drugs, and the resultant recovery in South Africa's life expectancy.
AIDS denialism is pretty-much dead in South Africa....it only ever was a pique of Thabo Mbeki, and because of his power as head of the ANC, the rest of the leadership had to be sycophantic.
Which means that as far as loss of human life goes, Thabo Mbeki belongs to the same category as Vladimir Putin with his war of conquest against Ukraine. Only the process wasn't as overtly violent, so the world didn't particularly care.
In my mind this mental framework features capitalism, democracy, and a style of thinking that emphasizes - or at least accommodates - kindness, openness, progress, thinking in nuances. Basically, humanism.
From my experience there, some population groups will reject ideas they see as white, which includes capitalism (origin: probably Europe?) but not communism (origin: Germany!). Others, including white folks, might feel inclined to embrace those "white" ideas specifically, but will reject other parts of the Enlightenment framework. Many think problems should be solved by force instead of careful and nuanced consideration, which is seen as effeminate.
Corruption is more of a symptom than a cause.
South Africa isn't a dictatorship, but the voters still vote along tribal lines, with a concerning minority (+-10%?) voting along race-hate lines.
It was the other imports (Communism, Prussian-like militarism) that would be better discarded.
Also there is a widely used app for load shedding timetables called "EskomSePush" which is a pun on "Eskom se poes" roughly translates to "Eskom's cunt" with poes being very vulgar and offensive.
Curious if there any SA expats here that can comment on their experience of emigrating? I have looked a bit but not very seriously. I should mention I do have a Netherlands passport (via my father).
The downside is that there is a severe housing crisis, and labour is in seriously short supply. I'm in Brisbane, and you can't eat out here after 8PM because everything is closed. Shops close early. Our car was smashed by a reckless driver in early November....it's going to be January before they even start fixing it...doing any kind of renovation or home repair is a traumatic experience because of a shortage of people (you can't do your own plumbing or electrical BTW).
I would not live in Sydney or Melbourne because of the high cost of housing, especially Sydney, since I'd probably live in some unpleasant, boiling hot suburb far west of the city to get anything I could afford.
No domestic workers is another pain point, although you adapt.
I'd say that if you have children, it might be worth emigrating from SA for their sakes, but if you don't have kids, and since you have an EU passport, it's entirely down to your preferences. The quality of life in South Africa for upper-middle-class people is pretty good. Anecdotally, many Australians move to places like Thailand or Bali for the sort of lifestyle South Africans enjoy. If you have a home paid for in SA, you can use your savings to travel overseas for relief from the load shedding and crime: I know a few SA upper middle class people who can afford to do that, while I have to pump every spare cent into my mortgage.
Am I happy I moved? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't have a family....probably not.
I will probably travel a bit to see.
You haven't looked seriously because of the Netherlands passport. You know that you always have a way out.
Those without such put much more effort into potentially improving their situation, because they have to.
The average house in South Africa uses 967 kWh of electricity per month. That's roughly a 5kw-6kw system, or 12-15 400W solar panels + inverters. Payback period at current prices is ~6-7 years.
https://www.myggsa.co.za/how-much-electricity-does-a-househo...
https://www.handymanhomes.co.za/energy-saving/how-much-will-...
... what? That's 11.000 kWh a year. Even in Germany, with water heating by electricity (which is rare because it's just so inefficient), homes rarely hit 6.000 kWh.
[1] https://www.energie.web.de/ratgeber/verbrauch/stromverbrauch...
The link you posted even mentions a range of 14,000 - 28,000 kWh for houses not built for efficiency.
Also, way less efficient hot water cylinders
Entirely depends on the number of accommodation units per building, installation and ongoing maintenance cost of heaters and metering equipment, availability of gas and/or district heating, etc. It's certainly uneconomical to send heated water through expensive copper pipes in a building inhabited by only two singles when it's needed only for a shower in the morning, yet has to be kept running for hygienic reasons the remainder of the day.
See also this graph - actual civil engineers have functionally vanished in the last 5 years from local government:
https://i.redd.it/lgi9xzxlc10a1.jpg
How do you maintaining key infrastructure without engineers? You don't.
https://www.capetownetc.com/news/how-to-register-your-solar-...
However this requirement is suspicious because there are already laws in place requiring people to use qualified electricians for doing high voltage work. The promise is not legally binging and there is a fear that the municipality will seek to recoup losses from lower electricity revenue (due to lower supply) by charging people for the electricity they generate themselves. This is not unheard of and an EU country like Spain charges this solar tax:
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/spain-approves-...
If a country doesn’t have enough resources to incentivise solar then fine, but don’t threaten to make money from people who will effectively only lower the burden on the grid that can’t meet demand. They just won’t invest in it then.
Worth mentioning that this is only really an option for middle class people and up, a sizable portion of the population barely have roofs let alone the money to put solar panels on them.