National disaster declared in South Africa and its power blackouts

Opportunistic criminals, rotting food, decomposing bodies, bankrupt businesses, and water shortages are all caused by crashes. Welcome to living with South Africa’s power blackouts.
South Africans were advised to bury dead loved ones within four days last week, revealing the grim extent of the outages.
Bodies in mortuaries are rapidly decomposing because of the unrelenting electricity outages, putting huge pressure on funeral parlors struggling to process corpses, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned in a public statement.
The situation is so bad that Cyril Ramaphosa, the country’s President, is considering declaring a national disaster, similar to one in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic, which had a devastating effect on the country’s economy.
Last week, under heavy security, scores of supporters from the Democratic Alliance opposition party marched through the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town to voice their frustrations over the persistent blackouts.
Widespread electricity blackouts, known locally as loadshedding, are carried out multiple times a day by state-owned energy utility Eskom to avoid the total collapse of the grid.
Eskom has stated that shortages on the electricity system unbalance the network and that controlled outages are necessary to ensure reserve margins are maintained and the system remains stable.
Since September 2022, scheduled blackouts have become routine in South Africa, affecting every part of society. The country has been experiencing on-off power outages for years.
Not having access to reliable power can, for some people, be the difference between life and death.
Lis Van Os needed oxygen for 17 hours a day before she died in October 2022. Her family said that her stationary oxygen machine requiring mains power made periods of loadshedding extremely stressful, particularly when power did not return as scheduled.
Her daughter Karin McDonald was forced to explore backup options such as inverters and a back up oxygen tank that only lasted for short periods.
“Everyone” she said, “was anxious towards the end of her life, because of the power outages.”
More than twice as many power cuts were experienced by South Africans in 2022 than in any other year. In 2023, things are going to get worse.
Even simple daily tasks, including meal planning, travel times, and work that requires internet connectivity, need to be arranged around loadshedding schedules.
Not having access to mains power makes daily life challenging for South Africans, from preparing baby formula to keeping fans running during the summer heat.
“The outages prevent me from simple tasks such as cooking,” said Maneo Motsamai, a domestic worker in Johannesburg.”

“The power went out while I was boiling water to cook mealie meal (maize porridge).” I can’t eat because it’s a waste. “I can’t cope like that,” Motsamai told CNN.
Many small businesses without access to backup power are having to close shop and lay off employees, according to people CNN spoke to, pump stations can’t provide water.
Soweto Creamery, an ice cream shop in Jabulani, Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg is run by Thando Makhubu. The family pooled small welfare grants they received during the Covid-19 pandemic to set up the business, but are now feeling the pressure from power outages.
The shop was without power for 72 hours in early January when electricity didn’t return as scheduled. They had to pay for diesel to run their generator and prevent their stock from melting. “The outages are costly and destroying their hopes of expanding,” he says.
“The outages affect every part of my fledgling business,” said Bongi Monjanaga, who runs a startup cleaning services company operating across Johannesburg. Such things as operating electric cleaning equipment, entering and leaving premises when security gates aren’t functioning, and having internet to invoice clients and complete online tax compliance documents are affected.
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I find myself in a pool of misery when I’m just trying to start up. She says, “I’m just trying to grow.”
South Africa’s food security is deeply worrying because of the escalation of power outages. This has driven up prices and placed an even greater strain on stretched household budgets.
Due to the increasing reliance of modern farming practices on electricity for crop irrigation, processing, and storage, loadshedding is having a huge impact on agricultural output.
“I 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,'” said Gys Olivier, a farmer from Hertzogville in the Free State province of east-central South Africa.
With pump stations reliant on electricity to operate, there is also less demand from growers due to water shortages.
Olivier says that they have done everything they can to make sure there is food on the table for a very good price, but that it has become capital-intensive to farm.
Livestock and poultry are dying before they even get to the slaughterhouse.
A video circulating on social media shows 50,000 dead broiler chickens being removed from a farm in North West province; the birds suffocated when power outages caused ventilation systems to stop. According to local media reports, the financial damage to the farmer was around ZAR1.6m ($93,300).
South Africa’s high crime rates are made worse by loadshedding, as home security systems fail when the power goes out, giving criminals a field day inside unsecured properties.
Policing becomes more difficult when officers are unable to reach crime scenes quickly due to traffic congestion when traffic lights are off.
“The load-shedding is a pandemic,” said Tumelo Mogodiseng, General Secretary of the South African Policing Union (SAPU).
“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, he says his members’ lives are now more at risk.”
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Police officers are dying every day in this country. What happens to them at night when there is no light for them to see?
Mogodiseng also worries that crimes are going unreported, with citizens fearful of leaving their houses during outages and traveling in the darkness, leaving them vulnerable to criminals. He told CNN that communities won’t travel to police stations to open cases because they are afraid.
“It’s hard to get solid data on the impact outages are having on crime,” says Gareth Newham, who runs the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria. Anecdotal evidence suggests criminals are exploiting outages, while the recent escalation of loadshedding has coincided with the Christmas holidays when crime rates typically spike.
He is concerned that if loadshedding continues or there is a temporary grid collapse, there could be coordinated civil unrest, rioting, and looting in parts of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces like there was 18 months ago.
A complete breakdown in the grid could trigger local level gangs to gain more power, potentially causing violence similar to that seen in July 2021.
Since 1994, Eskom has become synonymous with corruption, crime, and mismanagement under the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
A judge-led inquiry into graft under the former president, Jacob Zuma, found last year that there were grounds to prosecute several former Eskom executives.
Warnings from energy experts on looming supply shortages across the past two decades have gone ignored, and as a result, the government has failed to build new power stations to keep up with increased demand.
The South African Institution of Civil Engineering released a report in 2019 which showed that many skilled engineers have been leaving the country.
Although they spent billions of USD on two huge coal power stations, neither of them work properly.
Renewable energy companies say they are desperate to supply the grid, but the government has been slow to cut red tape and streamline regulatory processes that would reduce the time frame for environmental authorisations, registration of new projects and grid connection approvals.
The government and Eskom are facing a growing number of legal challenges. The following sentence can be rewritten as:
Several political parties and trade unions have announced that they will take legal action against the government and state utility for failing to meet their obligation to provide electricity.
There seems to be no end to the outages, and South Africans are desperate for alternative energy sources, but even these are out of the reach of many citizens.
“I was shocked by the cost to power my ice cream business off-grid,” said Thando Makhubu. We were quoted $5,945 for the job, and that excluded the solar panels.
The upfront costs of solar were prohibitive for Karin McDonald, who runs a swimming school, similarly found. “We received quotes for solar for the business and house and were not looking at anything less than half a million rand ($29,500),” she said. “That is a major life decision to make.”
The wait for solar is also long. “Last week, we had 40 requests for big solar projects,” said Angus Williamson, a cattle farmer from KwaZulu-Natal province.
Many South Africans are finding it hard to stay optimistic as they come to terms with their new reality.
“Williamson said that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train heading in our direction.”