For a moment, there was so much hope. Apartheid was over. South Africa had, for decades, essentially
operated as two different nations superimposed on the same landscape. There was the white nation—wealthy and westernized—boasting
a similar, if not higher standard of living to that of Europe due to its similarly strong
and diversified economy. Then there was the black nation—impoverished
and excluded from that wealthier white nation by a legally enshrined system of segregation. It felt like Europeans had just built an insular
outpost in Africa—that’s to say, it felt like what it was. But finally, following decades of internal
struggle and mounting international pressure that reached a climax with the waning need
for an African anti-Soviet ally, the nation’s new president announced the release of apartheid-era
political prisoners. Most of these prisoners were members of the
African National Congress—the strongest anti-apartheid force—including the famed
and beloved Nelson Mandela. As time marched forward, Mandela negotiated
with the existing government to ensure a peaceful transition—something some thought impossible—as
the structures of apartheid were stripped away. Then, in South Africa’s first truly democratic
election, the most symbolic moment yet: Nelson Mandela, the former prisoner, was elected
President of South Africa.
In the view of most, at that moment, South
Africa was brimming with potential. It had massive mineral wealth, it had a diversified
economy, it had a large highly-educated workforce—as the continent rose, the world hoped and believed
that South Africa could be the poster-child of the potential of African economic and human
development. If the white and black nations could truly
integrate into one, the country was well on its way towards being considered a social
and economic equivalent to, say, New Zealand—another former British colony in the southern hemisphere
that managed to transition into a self-sufficient, high-income, multicultural society. Crucial to this, perhaps the greatest task
that Mandela and his ANC party was faced with was how to build a black middle class. The legally enshrined systems of segregation
were easy to do away with—they could be reversed in an instant—but what was left
was a massive population trapped in the cycle of poverty. Simultaneously, there was the wealthy white
population at the center of the current economic system who would not tolerate a simple redistribution
of wealth. So the ANC had to thread the needle—correct
for historical wrongs while maintaining most of the status quo. Initially, they were fairly successful at
this. The beginnings came naturally as black party
members moved into many of the stable, well compensated public sector jobs previously
held by the white minority, then the trend permeated elsewhere as qualified individuals
excluded only due to the color of their skin entered every other newly desegregated profession. Formerly impoverished townships like Soweto
metamorphosed from slums into sprawling suburban neighborhoods filled with rows of single-family
homes and ample assortments of upscale restaurants and bars. And crucially, this wasn’t due to wealth
moving in, but rather wealth being built—the white population of Soweto stayed at just
a fraction of a percent. More broadly, nationwide, according to one
study’s definition, the black middle class grew from just 1.7 million in 2004 to 4.2
million just eight years later. As perhaps the strongest validation of South
Africa’s progress so far, the nation was selected to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup—an
event that had never-before taken place on the African continent. This sent a message. It said that, of anywhere in Africa, South
Africa was the place most capable of hosting the world’s second highest profile sporting
event. Inevitably, naysayers arose—they said the
nation couldn’t possibly build the stadiums in time; then when they did, they said the
stadiums were shoddy and would crumble apart; then when they didn’t, they said that fans
wouldn’t possibly show up, fearful for their lives in crime-riddled South African streets,
but they certainly did. As the sound of vuvuzelas engulfed the TV
broadcasts, the world was captivated by the host country and it was now thought of in
the same vein as Germany or Japan or France or any of the other World Cup hosts. But eventually, Spain bested the Netherlands;
the TV broadcasts wrapped up; the lights of Soccer City Stadium switched off; the fans
flew home; the years marched on; and time revealed an uncomfortable truth: while the
government was able to emulate stability for the short period—they were able to create
a facsimile of the experience in Germany or Japan or France—it didn’t last. Progress had stagnated. It might have actually reversed. This is perhaps best represented by this:
the least popular document in South Africa. Nowadays, it’s published each month by the
government-owned power utility, Eskom, and it outlines the schedule of when each municipality
will have their electricity supply shut off. After decades of deferred maintenance on a
power system mostly designed to service the white minority, plant failures have escalated
this issue into a chronic mismatch between supply and demand. That creates this dissonance: a country that,
in parts, looks as developed as the most upscale areas of Europe, yet is plunged into darkness
as frequently as its poorest African neighbors. These days, a lack of load-shedding is the
exception: so far in 2023, there have been 5,858 hours when the grid has failed to meet
demand. But while perhaps the most palpable issue
that creates some of the most sizable domino effects, South Africa is increasingly failing
to provide the absolute bare-bones of public services. In 2018, Cape Town nearly became the first
major city anywhere to run out of water as the city’s reservoirs ran dry during a drought—a
crisis created in part by a lack of government foresight—but more broadly and regularly,
the share of households with access to drinking water has started to decline in recent years. Water infrastructure is crumbling and just
recently, dozens have died on the outskirts of Pretoria, the administrative capital, due
to cholera—a disease virtually eliminated from the modern world thanks to modern sanitation
systems. The nation’s homicide rate is skyrocketing—climbing
up towards its all-time high—and the police and judiciary appear entirely ineffective
at combating this as just 20% of murders end up with anyone in court, and even then, just
31% of the public has trust in the courts as the legal system breaks down as well. South Africa’s state-owned freight rail
monopoly, Transnet, is too collapsing—in a very similar situation to Eskom—as it
closes lines, struggles to keep locomotives running, and carries 25% less cargo today
than in 2015—a massive constraint for the country’s lucrative, export-focused industrial
sector. South African Airways, which was separated
from Transnet in 2006 but remained government-owned, fully collapsed and ceased all operations
in 2020 before restarting with new financing as an embarrassing shell of its previously
globe-spanning self. No matter where one looks, one struggles to
find any case where a government service is improving in South Africa and the closer one
looks, the more sense this starts to make. When the blackouts began in 2007 they were
little more than random, local, short-lasted, inconvenient irregularities. Then, in the January heat of the southern
summer, they got a lot worse. With demand surging past supply, tourists
sat stranded in cable cars high above Cape Town, mines evacuated miners from shafts that
they could no longer ventilate or cool, and the South African government declared a national
emergency. The panicked power cuts made international
news and tipped global markets as the price of gold and platinum shot skyward after announcements
that mines might not open for another 6 weeks. It was not the first load shedding that Eskom
had mandated in recent months, but it was by far the worst. And it was right on time. In fact, this very moment, when South Africa’s
mighty grid was catastrophically overstretched by its consumers, had been predicted to nearly
the exact year in this 1998 white paper. As the paper had estimated, should no action
be taken to expand power supply in South Africa, the country’s surplus, then sitting at a
healthy 25% in 1997, would evaporate away by about 2007. And no action was taken. For all that changed politically and socially
with the end of apartheid and the rise of the ANC, South Africa’s grid on the supply
side just didn’t. Of the nation’s fifteen separate power plants
capable of producing more than 1,000 megawatts, only these two came online during the period
from 1990 to 2008, while these two were hastily brought back into production having been moth-balled
decades prior when the country was power flush. As heavy industry moved into the resource-rich
country and progressive minded policies extended the grid to black and under-privelaged neighborhoods
post-apartheid, the margin between power needed and power available first shrank, then disappeared
entirely. And why South Africa failed to take action
is also explained by this white paper. White papers, by their very nature, are supposed
to be, if not concise, as concise as possible: outlining specific problems, providing only
the context deemed absolutely necessary, and offering a set of specific options forward. This one runs 110 pages. And as for problems specifically facing the
supply side, well, those aren’t addressed until 41 pages in, where the danger of a potential
capacity shortage isn’t touched on until bullet point 7, behind issues of fair access
to the grid, environmental concerns, and wasteful usage. And as for fixing the problems, there’s
this: a vague memorandum to expand access and incentivize competition—recommendations
both problematically broad, and puzzling for Eskom officials who had, to this point, maintained
an understanding that as long it provided cheap electricity and lots of it, the state
would keep its hands off. The paper, like the government that authored
it, meant well, it properly identified the host of issues, but it pushed the longer term
problems to the back of the line and tried to radically reform through vague and confusing
mandates. With the grid and beyond it, there was just
too much to get to. Some problems the white paper identified were
addressed by the ANC, as grid access expanded and pathways for black managers to work for
the utility and black-owned businesses to contract with the utility were created. But other problems were only made worse, as
the ANC banned Eskom from building new plants to stimulate competition. Ultimately, only when no competition appeared
and the country began eating too far into its margin did the ANC reverse the ban. It was too little too late by then, as the
nation that had been known for its energy surplus—selling to nearby neighbors, and
producing megawatt hour totals nearer to European averages than those from its own continent—was
now energy insecure by 2007, with experts saying that they wouldn’t be able to dig
themselves out of the hole for another five years. But more than 15 years on, as additional power
plants have belatedly come online, the country’s still in the grips of regular rolling blackouts. Across the 2010s, power capacity in South
Africa steadily rose. The problem was, actual production still stagnated—it’s
one thing to build the plants, and another to keep them running. In late 2014 and early 2015, it was diesel
shortages, drought, and plant maintenance that cut national power production short of
demand. In 2019, it was a coal shortage, flooding,
and alleged sabotage that led to worse blackouts. Finally, beginning with maintenance issues
in 2021, South Africa entered a spiral into its worse outages ever—employee strikes
in June of 2022, fires and failures in September of 2022, then more plants failures in 2023
left some cities dark for entire days while, countrywide, blackouts occurred at least once
during 200 days of 2022—a new worst. Delayed maintenance, old coal plants, and
staff limitations were to blame. But so too was institutional rot. What was supposed to be fixed by ANC overhaul,
had fallen victim to the same ills plaguing the ANC itself. With cuts reaching 12 hours a day by the end
of 2022, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter privately resigned, a move which nearly killed him when
just hours after someone slipped a potentially lethal dose of cyanide into his coffee. In a now deleted interview revealing this
close call, the former CEO went on to accuse the ANC of institutional corruption where
Eskom served as the feeding trough, with an estimated 1 billion rand or $52 million dollars
being stolen from the state utility every single month. While such a number is nearly impossible to
verify, it would mark only the most direct loss that such widespread and long lasting
blackouts are creating. Post-apartheid GDP Growth, which the ANC had
once hoped to average 6% a year, has touched 4 percent only once since power shortages
began in 2007, while the South African Reserve Bank has estimated that blackouts from 6-12
hours a day rip about 204 to 899 million rand out of the economy a day—up to $50 million
dollars every single day. Eskom, for its part, has raised electricity
rates from the global basement yet still finds itself under a mountain of debt and unable
to consistently keep the lights on. Confronting this darkness, nearly everyone
and everything that feasibly and financially can are working to isolate themselves from
the government—to build self-sufficiency from the public services they can no longer
rely on. To start, with police response times often
stretching into hours, the wealthy rely on the world’s largest private security industry
to keep them and their homes safe. More people are employed by this industry,
in fact, than the police and military combined. That’s because nearly every expensive home
is plastered with a plaque indicating which of the plethora of armed response security
companies they’re subscribed to—each of which patrols the nice neighborhoods and shows
up far faster than the police. Outside of their homes, the life of the wealthy
has largely receded from urban downtowns into places like Sandton in Johannesburg or Sea
Point in Cape Town—both of which have organized into city improvement districts where the
local private sector groups together and pays into an organization that ensures safety by
hiring private security to patrol the streets. And some go further—filling potholes, fixing
street lights, cleaning litter, doing all the things that are the responsibility of
the government on paper, but that don’t happen regularly or reliably in practice. In sum, the proliferation of private security
and city improvement districts allows wealthy areas of the country to maintain a semblance
of stability—offering pockets where the day-to-day experience is no different than
that of Europe, for example. And this disconnect with their surroundings
goes further for the wealthy few as one of the nation’s booming industries is now solar
installation. South Africa’s total solar capacity has
more than doubled in just a year as those that can afford it are purchasing setups to
allow for stable electricity regardless of grid conditions. And as perhaps the penultimate form before
emigration, many wealthy residents are preparing to eliminate their reliance on the South African
state entirely by gaining the right to live abroad. Those that can obtain Australian or UK citizenship
based on ancestry are exercising those rights en masse, while immigration lawyers and nations
are increasingly capitalizing on the fears of those that can’t. Neighboring Namibia, for example, is developing
a sprawling golf resort in Walvis Bay that includes, with the purchase of a condo or
home, a renewable work permit for the country. Malta, St Kitts and Nevis, and others are
straight-up selling citizenship in exchange for six-figure so-called “investments”
in the countries, and plenty of South Africans with the wealth to do so are taking them up
on the offer in order to build-out their Plan Bs. Now, it’s not like South Africa hasn’t
been in a similar state before—there was a time when crime was as high; there was a
time when electricity access was worse; there was a time when, broadly, it was a less developed
nation than it is today. But what makes its current reality so grim
is that it’s a state of regression—it is devolving from its previous state as one
of the continent’s most developed economies. And this devolution is morphing into a death
spiral. Look no further than the load shedding. When the grid is turned off, the lack of dangerous
electric currents makes it easy for thieves to remove copper cables and transformers. With each theft, the power utility has to
divert resources towards fixing these new issues, rather than the generating issues
that are causing the blackouts in the first place. This makes the root cause worse, which makes
blackouts more common, which makes theft more common, which makes the root cause worse,
and so on. A certain degree of solution could come from
the overarching government, rather than simply within the power utility itself, but with
each power cut, businesses lose money—production stops, food spoils, thieves steal. The causes are myriad, but the effect is consistent:
less income which leads to a lower tax-base for the government which leaves it with less
money to bring back around to solve the root cause, which makes blackouts more common,
which makes the economic loss higher, which makes the root cause worse, and so on and
so on. As all this occurs, quality of life declines
for everyone in South Africa—even the wealthy few. They have to deal with higher crime, the inconvenience
of load shedding, and a weakening economy and rand exchange rate which makes purchasing
foreign-made goods and services increasingly out of reach. With the luxury of choice, the rich are emigrating—bringing
with them their wealth, knowledge, and business, which weakens the economy, which makes the
government less able to address the root cause, which makes blackouts more common, which makes
more emigrate, which weakens the economy, which makes the government less able to address
the root cause, which makes the root cause worse, and so on and so on and so on. This death spiral extends society-wide. It is now a central, unique defining feature
of the South African state. As the continent’s poverty rate plummets,
South Africa’s is rising. As the continent’s human development rates
go up, South Africa’s declines. As almost every indicator of human and economic
progress improves on the continent, South Africa’s regresses. That’s to say: this isn’t some systematic
issue, there isn’t some force of nature making the nation’s decline inevitable,
which leaves just one other possible culprit: the government. Support for the African National Congress—once
synonymous with support for the end of apartheid—has reached an all-time low. 2021 was the first municipal election that
saw their share of the national vote drop below 50%—essentially every issue has only
escalated since then, and new stories of corruption and cronyism within the party emerge every
day. In 2024 the nation will elect a new national
assembly and, with declining support and a growing coalition in opposition, the ANC is
on its most tenuous footing ever, and the country could see functional political plurality
for the first time in the post-apartheid era. Now, as rhetoric focuses on whether South
Africa will slide into failed state status, there is a question worth asking on whether
the nation has ever actually been a functional state. There was a time when it seemed more stable
and prosperous than today, but that was only the part of the nation that one saw on World
Cup broadcasts, the part lived in by South Africans one would meet abroad—more specifically,
it was the white nation, while the black nation’s voices were stifled. Through the apartheid era, South Africa failed
to provide basic services of an acceptable standard—sanitation, education, police—to
the majority of its population: the black population. By many definitions, that is a failed state. So that’s to say, basic services have never
been at an acceptable level—the difference is that today, the deficiency is being shared
more equally. It would’ve been unrealistic to expect that
a standard of living experienced by a privileged minority propped up by oppression itself could
be immediately extended to all—it was always going to be a tricky transition. But tragically, the ANC—the institution
most responsible for inciting this transition—is now slowing it down. Party members are using their positions to
steal from the state, to use oppression to prop up the privileged—the very dynamic
they fought to end. Perhaps the sole light in the situation is
the fact that it has worsened enough that one can identify that the transition is failing—that
a new approach is needed. South Africa still has a starting point that
would be the envy of most of its continental neighbors—it still has a robust economy,
a relatively high standard of living, and is naturally indebted with valuable resources—so
it's not too late to capitalize on its situation and create a thriving state that truly works
for all, but the window of opportunity is slowly starting to close. With each passing day, those with the luxury
of choice are giving up—they’re packing their bags and driving to the airport one
last time. With each hour of load shedding, the economy
shrinks further, and the death spiral accelerates. Hope is not lost in South Africa, but with
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