A Country At Its Watt's End

When will the lights come back? South Africa experienced 2,409 cumulative hours of power cuts by November this year, forcing many small businesses to use generators, or eventually close.

- LILLIAN ROBERTS

LOAD SHEDDING, UNSURPRISINGLY, IS THE 2022 South African ‘word of the year’ announced by the Pan South African Language Board in collaboration with Focal Points, a media research company. Load shedding, a term for rolling blackouts, has been a regular feature of South African life since 2015, and the latest statutory assessment of the power system showed that South Africa’s embattled state-owned utility, Eskom, will be unable to meet the electricity needs of the country for the next five years.

South Africa has experienced 2,409 cumulative hours of load shedding by November, according to data from EskomSePush, a load-shedding app in the country. September broke the record for scheduled outages in a month, amounting to 570 hours.

In the Melville and Westdene suburbs of Johannesburg, the hustle and bustle of the city is a permanent soundscape. But in the background, another sound reigns supreme – the throaty roar of generators. It’s ubiquitous in the secondary business districts of Johannesburg, where electricity cuts are constant, and water delivery is spotty.

“It’s affected everything,” rues Rui Miranda, owner of Old Charlie’s Tobacconist. “People feel lost when there’s no power.” At the time that he spoke to FORBES AFRICA, Vodacom services were down, with his MTN-based speed point on two bars of service.

“If the towers are down, it’s another problem,” he says. He can’t order using EFTs during load shedding. Cell tower service differs, with the majority of towers using battery or generator backup power. When the back-up goes offline, so too does connectivity.