CAPE TOWN, South Africa. When I sat down to write this column, a power cut at 6:00 am on a winter Thursday was very fitting.
For me, this meant I had to stay in a comfortable hotel with emergency lighting, type in the dark, and use my phone to connect to the internet. There is a generator in the main building: breakfast will be provided.
For the rest of the city and students, this means their rainy season is even more miserable.
In the morning, when parents try to feed and dress their children without sending them to school, workers enter the city from remote slum camps, business owners open their shops and factories in the hope of making money. Payroll in a pandemic-affected economy.
An entire production day, an entire lesson plan, an entire program gone. And in the darkness where the streetlights once shined, there is also the fear of crime on the road.
Load shedding has been a reality for South Africans for almost a decade. Twenty years ago, the state-owned energy company Eskom produced the cheapest electricity in Africa. It even considers innovative designs such as modular gravel-bed nuclear reactors. It is an important asset and is considered an important candidate for privatization to attract foreign investors.
Today Eskom is a dump that South Africa hates for the hardships it brings to their lives by earning high wages.
Eskom’s failure was inevitable. This is the result of concrete decisions of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Rather than privatize the company, the ANC bowed to union allies who believed Eskom would remain in state hands for ideological reasons. The ruling party forced Eskom to pursue an aggressive policy of affirmative action, which resulted in rewarding his followers with jobs, awarding contracts to friends, and resulting in the company having many talented engineers.
The country was warned that it would eventually run out of power:
In 1998, the Ministry of Mines and Energy said that “excess capacity to manufacture Eskom will be fully usable by 2007.”
This warning was ignored and as predicted in 2007 South Africa was out of power and had to initiate the load shedding.
Energy experts later issued several warnings about the country’s electricity shortages, but these were also ignored.
The interests of Eskom’s corrupt executives and politically connected businessmen came before the interests of the country.
Now the facts can no longer be denied, because the country sits in the dark. However, change is difficult in a system dominated by a single political party.
Cities like Cape Town, led by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), have decided to do the unthinkable and go beyond Eskom to offer offers from private energy companies. Johannesburg, which was recently bought by the district attorney in local elections, is doing the same. But these decisions are still far away.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s major cities are experiencing intermittent power outages that are killing the country’s economic growth and causing unspeakable poverty, especially for the poor.
I met an old friend’s daughter for tea yesterday. He lives in a corrugated iron hut in the town of Khayelitsha and studies law at a local university, hoping to break out of poverty. She was previously giving a PowerPoint presentation in class when she was delayed due to load shedding.
In another power outage last week, her smartphone, in which she was hoping for school assignments, literally exploded when the power came back after the power was restored. He showed me his burnt lip.
We might think it’s just a third world phenomenon, be careful: it’s coming to the US.
California experienced constant power outages when wind and solar failed to meet demand during the heat wave in August 2020. In February 2021, the same thing happened in Texas during the freezing winter that froze wind turbines.
We are running towards “renewable” energy sources, moving away from fossil fuels and moving towards “green” policies that will have little impact on global climate change.
In both South Africa and the USA, ideology prevails over common sense. In either case, the wiser approach is to adopt careful and gradual reforms: to train more black engineers without losing the skilled men who were unfairly won under the old regime; adding green energy to the menu of options without removing fossil fuels.
Instead, critics of these policies are demonized and marginalized, such as racists in South Africa, those who “reject” the US climate. Warnings are ignored as a climate of ideological conformity creates opportunities for corruption.
Load shedding is an artificial deficiency. Once you start it’s hard to stop. We in the US must change course while we still can.
Joel B. Pollack is Senior Editor and news anchor for Breitbart News Breitbart Market News Every Sunday night from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM ET (4:00 PM to 7:00 PM PT) on Sirius XM Patriot. He is the author of the recently published e-book Neither Free nor Fair: 2020 US Presidential Election. last book ALSO NOVEMBERtells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries from a conservative perspective. Won the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Scholarship. follow him on twitter @joelpollak.
Source: Breitbart
