I had no idea things were so desperate, and that’s after knowing what miserable shape the country is in.

Car crashes, opportunistic criminals, rotting food, decomposing bodies, bankrupt businesses, and water shortages. Welcome to life under South Africa’s power blackouts.

Last week the grim extent of the outages was laid bare when South Africans were advised to bury dead loved ones within four days.

In a public statement, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that bodies in mortuaries were rapidly decomposing because of the unrelenting electricity outages, putting huge pressure on funeral parlors struggling to process corpses.

The load-shedding outages have become so routine…

…Shortages on the electricity system unbalance the network, and Eskom has stated that controlled outages are necessary to ensure reserve margins are maintained, and the system remains stable.

While the country has been experiencing on-off power outages for years, since September 2022 scheduled blackouts have become routine, affecting every part of South African society.

…South Africa has now gone over 100 days with outages every day.

South Africa has had power cuts for 99 consecutive days: pic.twitter.com/Wx46bpigoB

— Mwango Capital (@MwangoCapital) February 6, 2023

For life and businesses trying to deal with the uncertainty and potential losses…

No power, no pinot – South Africa's struggling vineyards https://t.co/qijEsRotMc

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) February 7, 2023

…that’s unsustainable.

…The escalation of power outages is also deeply worrying for South Africa’s food security, driving up prices, and placing an even greater strain on stretched household budgets.

With modern farming practices ever more reliant on electricity for crop irrigation, processing, and storage, loadshedding is having a huge impact on agricultural output.

Gys Olivier, a farmer from Hertzogville in Free State province, in east-central South Africa, says he and other farmers in the area have been forced to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of seed potatoes due to disruptions to the ‘cold chain’ – (the process of keeping produce refrigerated throughout the supply chain.)

There is also less demand from growers due to water shortages, with pump stations reliant on electricity to operate.

Poultry is dying by the thousands because ventilation fans are cut off, ice cream and dairy products are either spoiling, or the business owners are being bankrupted by having to buy generators and the hugely expensive diesel to run them when the power cuts out.

…Food, consumer goods companies and retailers in South Africa are cranking up diesel generators and spending more on back up power supplies, adding to the pressure from soaring costs for raw materials, transportation and packaging.

South African businesses and households are spending between six and ten hours a day without electricity as state-owned utility Eskom implements some of the harshest blackouts in living memory owing to breakdowns at its coal-fired power plants.

…The council, whose members include the country’s biggest supermarket group and food producer Shoprite (SHPJ.J) and Tiger Brands (TBSJ.J), said if the crisis continues, businesses will not be able to guarantee stable supplies of food, medicines and other essential goods.

Shoprite has said its additional spend on diesel to operate generators amounted to 560 million rand ($32 million) in the six months to Jan.1.

Supermarket group Pick n Pay (PIKJ.J) spent 346 million rand in the 10 months to Dec. 25 to run generators, and is currently spending about 60 million rand ($3.5M US) per month.

The culprit in all this is the country’s nationalized energy company known as ESKOM and it’s corruption central. They’ve spent billions on coal-fired plants that don’t run properly, the older plants haven’t been maintained, engineers who could fix things have been leaving the country in droves and organized crime snatches up replacement parts before they ever make it to the plants.

…Under the ruling African National Congress (ANC), in charge since 1994, Eskom has become synonymous with corruption, crime, and mismanagement.

Last year a judge-led inquiry into graft under the former president, Jacob Zuma, found that there were grounds to prosecute several former Eskom executives.

The government has failed to build new power stations to keep up with increased demand, and warnings from energy experts on looming supply shortages across the past two decades have gone ignored.

With the dearth of power and the uncertainty surrounding the schedule for when it will actually be on, crime is out of control in a place that was already known for pretty horrific crimes to begin with.

…South Africa is notorious for high crime rates, and loadshedding is making it worse as home security systems fail when the power goes out, giving criminals a field day inside unsecured properties.
Policing also becomes harder, with officers unable to reach crime scenes fast enough due to congestion when traffic lights are off.

Tumelo Mogodiseng, General Secretary of the South African Policing Union (SAPU), describes the load-shedding as “a pandemic.”

He says his members’ lives are now more at risk, with officers unable to see potentially dangerous situations in the darkness, and police stations, many of which don’t have backup power systems, at risk of attack from criminals during blackouts.

“Police are dying every day in this country. If this is happening in the daylight, what happens when there is no light for them to see at night?”

Highway and railway robbery are commonplace, which also affects commodity prices. Who would want to drive a delivery truck?

Being a trucker in South Africa😳 pic.twitter.com/bV6m1jQZkq

— 🔥⭐️Edwin⭐️🔥 (@Edwin07011) February 4, 2023

And every day South Africans are having a more and more difficult time. The government tries to make some allowances for the skyrocketing cost…

But it’s only 50units per month…. Unless others get more. My grandmothers village only gets 50units which lasts only 2-3 days😂😂😂😂after that Ziyakhala

— Mkay🇿🇦🇿🇦✊🏽✊🏽 (@mkay_ramz) February 7, 2023

…but the efforts are laughable amid the ongoing corruption and perpetual threat of violence, mob or otherwise.

…His biggest concern is that continued loadshedding or a temporary grid collapse could lead to a repeat of the coordinated civil unrest, rioting, and looting in parts of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces 18 months ago.

“A complete breakdown in the grid could be the trigger for local level gangs getting more power, and we could see a similar kind of violence to that we saw in July 2021.”

There’s an international push for renewables. One shop owner did investigate putting solar on his roof to offset the power outages. But the cost was over $5K without the panels! There’s no way he could afford it. As well, all this solar talk ignores the fact it is years down the road, and they need power now. If they fixed everything they had, it still wouldn’t be enough to meet the demand of the population they have at the moment. South African leaders have never built for the future. They’ve spun their wheels and let the graft and corruption eat whatever advantage they might have had.

The power situation is also starting to affect the So African mining industry and that could spell disaster.

Those mines don’t have a canary. They are the goose that lays the golden egg and the government surely doesn’t want that bird sick or dying.

Energy minister Gwede Mantashe says that the ongoing energy crisis in South Africa is an “irritation” to society, and if it is not resolved, it could lead to a revolt among the populace.

Speaking at the Investing in Africa Mining Indaba on Monday (6 February), the minister said that the ongoing power supply disruptions through load shedding had a significantly negative impact on society and the economy at large.

For the mining industry, in particular, load shedding and other domestic factors like freight and transport bottlenecks have contributed to an overall decline in the sector.

…Estimates from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) are that the country loses around R900 million a day at stage 6. The central bank has cut the country’s GDP growth prospects for 2023 to a paltry 0.3% in 2023 on the basis that blackouts have cut two percentage points of growth from the economy.

At the centre of our current energy challenges, Mantashe said, is the decline in the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) from an estimated 75% to 49%.

He said that the most feasible and logical option to resolve load shedding is thus arresting the decline in the EAF.

“Failure to attend to and address the declining Eskom plant performance and subsequent higher stages of load shedding is an irritation to society and has the potential of pitting society against the government,” he said.

This could get really, really ugly.