Electricity powers the world, from incubators for infants to computers to industry to homes. When it fails, the results can be catastrophic. That is what makes Israel’s denial of fuel to Gaza’s power station such an enormity. The collective punishment of helpless Palestinians corralled into the Gaza Strip is a crime in international law and it is being perpetrated by Israelis who ought to remember all too well the wicked crimes committed against them.
But sometimes power fails for other reasons. Along the US Eastern Seaboard in 2003, a 20-cent fuse blew, cutting electricity to 50 million people. In Zimbabwe, gross economic mismanagement means the government cannot afford to run power stations. And now in South Africa, rolling power cuts are regularly blighting people’s lives. What is happening there is the more startling since, when the ANC came to power in 1994, the state electricity generator, Eskom, had so much excess power that there were plans to sell it to neighboring states using an ambitious international grid. Now Eskom chiefs have had to issue the startling warning that no major industrial investment should be contemplated in South Africa until 2013, because there will simply not be enough power available.
This extraordinary crisis has, it is said, arisen for a number of reasons. One is the stalled process to privatize the bureaucratic state utility. Yet that hardly seems plausible. Any public utility that is set to be offered to investors ought to be maximizing its performance in order to boost the sum the government will receive when it is sold. That means that the 4,800-megawatt coal-fired station, which Eskom says will not be on stream until six years from now, should already have been built, or at least be nearing completion. Not only should it have been fully expected that, for the economy to grow strongly, more power would have to be generated but also the government and Eskom knew perfectly well that their program to deliver clean water and electricity to all black townships demanded extra generation.
The current wave of outages is apparently being caused by taking down generator sets for maintenance in advance of the South African winter. This astonishing lack of planning may rest to some degree with the lack of good senior management at Eskom. This in turn is a consequence of the ANC’s political dominance for the last 14 years, encouraging political cronyism and a lack of responsibility among public figures.
In the early stages in developing countries, power blackouts were an accepted risk, overcome by generators for hospitals, shops and factories. However, as the economies grew, the outages became less frequent and when they occurred, caused increasing public protests because extensive disruption was no longer acceptable. It is an ill omen when a country that once boasted excess power suddenly finds it does not have enough and as a result has to suspend new industrial projects.
