South Africa is a country that had the gall to accuse Israel of genocide in the international justice court. It is always important to observe genocides at the beginning than lamenting it after it is perpetrated and thousands of lives lost. There is no solid proof of genocide perpetrated by the state of Israel in Gaza at the moment.
South Africa is worried about Palestinians pledge and rightly so, for the pledges of people suffering in Gaza since Israel has stopped supplies of potable water and electricity to Gaza.
This is expected after the terrorist attacks of October 7th 2023 where more than a thousand civilians were murdered, hundreds of women were raped and babies were decapitated and unarmed civilians were shot in the back of their head while being filmed by the terrorists.
There is a shortage of water and electricity in Gaza and there is a shortage of water and electricity in South Africa. A mirror effect that one can not dismiss.
South Africa has some of the largest reserves of minerals. Diamonds, gold, iron and other minerals are buried into South Africa and there is a huge industry that takes them out of the deeps of the earth and sell them to the world.
The position of the country makes it one of the passageways for super big ships that are far too big to go through the Suez Canal, thus making Cape Town one of the important harbors for bunkering in the world.
After Apartheid, one of the most repugnant structures of prejudice ever, South Africa was in the path to prosperity with a so called majority rule for all.
WATER AND POWER SHORTAGES
So why a country that was so prosperous has problems with utilities today?
The answer is complex as usual, but one thing is not the main reason. There is no lack of resources. South Africa is not a desert and have plenty of rain during the rainy season. The problem is that half of the rain falls into a tenth of the area, with the rest of the land being semi-arid.
There are fluctuations of the rain from year to year, mostly due to El Niño and La Niña effects on the oceans. Whenever the temperature on the Pacific Ocean rises – El Niño – there are shortages of rain in South Africa. This is bad enough and during the drought, agriculture and even drinkable water is rationed.
Until recently South Africa was considered a role model on management of the water resources, with collection of the water in reservoirs managed to be released in the drought season, making up for the lack of rain.
The institutional reforms in South Africa of 1994 changed the method of management of water, decentralizing the decision making and letting regional political leaders control the resources. The management problem is always exacerbated by corruption and ethnical preferences in the distribution and cronism.
This has disastrous consequences due to the fact that half of the rain falls into 10% of the land. This means that the 10% blessed with rains must manage the resources for the 90% of the nation and it is hard to make the local population save water while they know rain have been abundant. This problem is compounded with the fact that South Africa is not an uniform nation, but a conjoint nation of different tribe-nations with significative differences that must be respected within themselves. Water use is different for Xhosas and Zulus, with one farming more and the other being cattle oriented.
FREE WATER CURSE
A difficult problem is present in South Africa and in most water deficient places: potable water is free. This is a hard problem to solve for the water is free for the poorest populations and charged for the farmers and industries as a form of protecting the poor from thirst.
The reason it is a problem is that these populations are significative and usually far from the nucleus of the cities, these communities are built on the non occupied outskirts of the cities. Some notable communities are the Favelas in Brazil, El Alto in Bolivia and Jodhpur in India. The cost of installing the infrastructure to these communities are not paid by the communities, for they are the poorest in the region, but as they must receive potable water, the politicians capture these populations votes exchanging it for the water works. This co-dependency opens the wedge for corruption, for the project will be funded by a lump sum as sunken cost by the central government and not by the tariffs on water from the consumer. This has proven to be a problem in Brazil and South Africa with a series of projects being denounced as tainted by corruption.
The other sad part is that when a resource is not paid for, it is not valued. This apply to farmers with free access to water from rivers and lakes as well as to the communities that have free water access. This incentive waste. One must always consider that the poor population of a country, even in the rich United States or Sweden is about 50% minimum. Thus these populations consume an average of two cubic meters of water per day. Multiplying it for half of the population, the volume of water consumed is huge. In South Africa the population that does not pay for water is greater and this makes up for a significative impact.
In the past few years, South Africa water management policies have introduced awareness of water waste with very good results, reducing water waste like sweeping sidewalks with water hoses and washing cars manually.
Water is a valuable resource and all people must know its value, even if they do not have to pay for it.
STATE CAPTURE
Besides the change in legislation dismounting a water management system that worked, the decentralization also allowed for more corruption. “In 2016, Mike Muller, a former water affairs director general, noted that the so-called radical economic transformation initiatives are nothing but state capture by a corrupt elite. Systemic corruption has had such a debilitating impact on the country’s water and sanitation service that the number of people without a reliable water supply increased by 2 million between 2011 and 2015. Also, by 2016, construction of the Vaal River System water supply scheme, was in 2016 more than five years late (Muller, 2016) and telemetry within the Vaal River system no longer functions properly because of finances that had been diverted elsewhere, such as to fund election campaigns. Due to cadre deployment, the country is rapidly losing its ability to manage the country’s water resources. Since 1998, only two of the nine envisioned CMAs had been established: the Breede-Gouritz and the Inkomati-Usuthu (Meissner et al., 2016). Currently, plans are afoot to consolidate the nine CMAs into six due to financial constraints.”
These publications are from 2016 and their predictions were realized. The water crisis is here to stay and the 2023 El Niño have only exacerbated a man made problem.
THE POWER UTILITY CRISIS
South Africa created a novel modality of electric energy supply they call load shedding, an euphemism for power outages that plagues even the biggest cities as Johanesburg, Cape Town and even the capital Pretoria have been afflicted with shortages.
Some of the poorest neighborhoods do not pay for electricity, this is the same problem with water. The poorest people do not pay for electricity, but as in socialist countries “they do not pay for things they do not get”. The problems affects the poor hardest because they can not protect food from rotting and they can not afford generators.
The electricity shortage have similarities with the water shortages. Eskon has been managed not to maximize the interest of the stakeholders – owners, clients, partners, community – but to favor those who were in power in corruption scheme to the value of 1 billion Rand per month, about 53 million US dollars in 24th march 2024, according to Andre de Ruyter, ex CEO of Eskon and author of Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom 2023.
According to de Ruyter, Eskon has created a culture of “negligence and carelessness had become cemented into the organisation” where people responsible for the operations would not perform duties and let equipment rot.
Also according to de Ruyter there were fraudulent contracts for transportation that never took place and payments with no reason whatsoever.
Not all problems were due to corruption. There were directives from the South African government that there would be other private companies investing in the Electric sector, a needed investment, “The South African government published a white paper, which was essentially a policy document that set out what the objectives are for dealing with the electricity industry going forward. And in that document, a mention was made that Eskom would no longer be allowed to build new generation capacity because the paper said there would instead be reforms to the energy sector that would allow the private sector to come in and build that generation capacity. Now, building that generation capacity was crucial due to two factors. First, an expected growth in consumption, bearing in mind that the economy was growing and the largely African community that had been disadvantaged in terms of electricity supply, amongst many other things, under the apartheid era, were now being served with electricity connection, so the demand for electricity had suddenly increased substantially. The second element is that it was already anticipated back then that the aging coal fleet would have to be retired and replaced. Any mechanical piece of equipment has a finite age – you don’t see many 50-year-old cars on the road anymore, they all eventually break down and then need to be replaced.” as per Andre de Ruyter interview for YRIS, link for the full interview below.
The problem of state capture have increased with the ascension of “Jacob Zuma, president from 2009 to 2018, Eskom contracts worth almost 15bn rand ($1.4bn) were given to cronies, many of them to businesses linked to the Indian born Gupta brothers, according to a recent judge led
inquiry. ” (The economist July 16th 2022).
State capture is euphemism for corruption. The political system of South Africa has a problem that must be solved. The plans for expansion of production of energy were never put in practice and South Africa a country that exported electricity to its neighbors today have buy it, when available and use thermoelectric power plants rented to add up to the supply.
NAÏVE MAJORITY RULE
The problem with naïve majority rule is that old question that dates back to Plato. The majority will be prey to some politician who promises the rewards and avoids the hard choices.
Naïve majority have forced the hand of the South Africa primary power generator, Eskon, not to collect the bills from the poorest populations. This was a pledge with empathetic meaning not to make the poorest pay for electricity. The problem, of course, is that even the rich or remediated would claim to be poor in order not to pay for the electricity bills.
Eskon also had to change its employment slate, in order to accommodate the new power in town and the criteria was the ethnicity of the individual, not the character or competence. Soon, the composition was changed and then the malice got a wedge.
There are competent engineers from all ethnicities in all places. In apartheid South Africa, there was segregation in schools, but there were universities that were catered for the majority ethnicity and others that catered to the minority ethnicity. There was of course a large offer of technical college places for the majority ethnicity, for the obvious reasons that the minority rulers wanted to have all people working.
But the overall lack of development in the country has made the most competent graduates from the schools to emigrate to places with better salaries and career prospects, leaving a void that is not easily replaced. One must remember that South Africa record on public safety has been deteriorating for decades.
South Africa has been governed by a minority ethnicity. This maybe a surprise for many, but since the end of apartheid a minority of Xhosas have ruled over a majority of Zulus. This is not what we could have expected, for the plight of the world was to end minority rule. Zulus are 23% of the population and Xhosa are 16% of the population.
This creates an artificial power network and creates bonds between the politicians that are not based on political vote alone. The favors dispensed and the cunning support of areas where the incumbent is credibly challenged keeps the ANC a Xhosa party in power.
Corruption is a problem all over the world and South Africa is not protected from it. The current president net worth value is enourmous with shady origins, being favored by the ANC grip in power since 1994.
Cyril Ramaphosa the current South African president has a long list of accusations of corruption since he was appointed to the unions in the first post apartheid government. Some of the allegations are under investigations today. Ramaphosa is part of the ANC nucleus where all presidents from South Africa have been appointed and then elected. Ramaphosa have been robbed recently and have no means to justify the millions robbed.
This is preposterous. The reason the corruption is being investigated is because the corruption money has been robbed.
The South African problem with utilities is a symptom, not the cause of the problems. The voters in South Africa must change the government to one that does not enrich its elites in detriment of the population.
Socialists incline governments have dominated South Africa politics since the end of apartheid and it must end. It does not serve the people.
References.
water-report_2020-single-pages-Final.pdf (corruptionwatch.org.za) https://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/water-report_2020-single-pages-Final.pdf
Overview of the South African Water Sector (dws.gov.za) https://www.dws.gov.za/IO/Docs/CMA/CMA%20GB%20Training%20Manuals/gbtrainingmanualchapter1.pdf
South Africa’s water sector: a case study in state capture (theconversation.com) https://theconversation.com/south-africas-water-sector-a-case-study-in-state-capture-69581
Hawks arrest Eskom manager in connection with R1m fraud at utility (dailymaverick.co.za) https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-02-08-hawks-arrest-eskom-manager-in-connection-with-r1m-fraud-at-power-utility/
‘By Not Speaking Out, You Become Complicit:’ Former Eskom CEO André De Ruyter On Energy And Corruption In South Africa – The Yale Review Of International Studies (yira.org) https://yris.yira.org/interviews/by-not-speaking-out-when-something-is-wrong-you-become-complicit-former-eskom-ceo-andre-de-ruyter-on-energy-and-corruption-in-south-africa/#:~:text=After%20surviving%20the%20assassination%20attempt,the%20nation%27s%20ongoing%20energy%20crisis.
The man with a plan to fix Eskom (economist.com) https://www.economist.com/business/2022/07/14/the-man-with-a-plan-to-fix-eskom