Power Cuts Imperil South Africa's Strong Growth

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RODGER BOSCH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE - GETTY IMAGES

Traffic slows during power failures as lights fail and intersections become four-way stops, to the frustration of drivers.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — At first, the power blackouts seemed a mere nuisance, the electricity suddenly dead for two or three hours at a time, two or three times a day. Radio announcers jocularly advised listeners to make their morning toast by vigorously rubbing two pieces of bread together and wisecracked about amorous uses for the extra darkness.

But after three weeks of chronic failures —after regularly irregular vexations with lifeless computers, stove tops and stoplights — public forbearance has given way to outrage. This nation, long a reliable repository of cheap, plentiful electricity, finds itself pitifully short of juice.

The government has confessed to an “electricity emergency” and has begun a program of rationing for industrial users. This is a mortifying turn for a country that considers itself the powerhouse of Africa and resists comparisons to its underdeveloped, famine-plagued neighbors.

But electricity shortages, now expected to be a fact of life for the next five years, are more than an embarrassment. They threaten continued strong growth here in a nation that accounts for a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output and ranks among the world’s top 25 countries in gross domestic product.

A bookstore in Cape Town closes when the electricity goes out. South Africa faces frequent power failures.

Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa’s own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

One of this nation’s largest employers, the mining industry, virtually halted production for four days last week because Eskom, the dominant, government-controlled utility, could not guarantee enough power to ventilate and cool the deep underground shafts. Companies that mine gold and platinum restarted production only on Tuesday after emergency negotiations with Eskom, South Africa’s Chamber of Mines said.

“The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event,” said Anton Eberhard, a business school professor at the University of Cape Town and an energy expert.

“That’s a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa’s reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines.” The current crisis stems from Eskom’s lack of capacity to generate enough power, and its inability to keep many of its plants working.

The predicament was foretold. In 1998, a government report warned that at the rate the economy was growing, the nation faced serious electricity shortages by 2007 unless capacity was expanded. The government, led by President Thabo Mbeki, who assumed office in June 1999, tried unsuccessfully to induce private investors to build additional power plants. Only belatedly did it permit Eskom to begin the necessary expansion.

“The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong,” Alec Erwin, the public enterprises minister, said last Friday at a much-anticipated news briefing that broke a mystifying public silence.

This statement was a rare admission of fault by a prideful, post-apartheid government. Mr. Mbeki, now in the final year of his second term, can legitimately boast of many successes, among them the provision of electricity to the impoverished masses. Since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, South Africa has doubled the percentage of its population connected to the grid to more than 70 percent.

Though the government insists it will not allow the power crisis to jeopardize future industrial projects and interfere with plans to play host to the 2010 World Cup in soccer, many experts consider the power shortage a lamentable foul-up likely to undo some of Mr. Mbeki’s economic accomplishments.

“The warnings were well-known, but the government was too aloof and arrogant to act,” said William Mervin Gumede, the author of “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the A.N.C.” (Zebra Press, 2005, with a revised edition in 2007). “This is simply disastrous for the economy. You can throw out all the goals of 6 percent economic growth.”

South Africans are appalled by the daily interruptions to their lives. Workers sit idle, televisions flick into darkness and silence, elevators stall between floors, gas stations cannot pump, cakes remain forever half-baked. Every intersection with disabled traffic lights becomes a four-way stop, with drivers in each direction maddeningly delayed as the endless lines of cars inch forward.

Eskom calls the power failures “load shedding,” rotating the cuts around neighborhoods, allocating the inconvenience. The utility has a Web site with a dial in the corner; a needle gyrates between “safe” and “danger.”

The load shedding has three degrees of severity, and on the worst days, a community may experience half a day without power. The site provides a timetable for each area, but the schedule is often wrong. In coming months, when rationing is extended to residential users, the power shutdowns should be more predictable.

At Sandton City, suburban Johannesburg’s gargantuan, upscale shopping complex, the power cuts leave the mall with the eerie stillness of an interrupted stage performance. Customers and sales clerks appear stunned by the abrupt gloom, wondering whether to give up or carry on.

At The Bread Basket, a gourmet food store in the mall, the 33 employees hurry to complete their transactions in the near dark. Backup power supplies keep the cash registers working for a few minutes.

Then the store’s doors reluctantly close, with the scones, croissants and baguettes left stillborn in the ovens, the tuna salad, couscous and tzatziki dip slowly going bad as the refrigeration cases lose their cool.

“What can we do?” said the owner, Panos Avraamides. “We throw out all the salads, all the dips, all the antipastos, I let the employees have a one-hour break. Then they come back and stand around and do nothing.”

Norman Samuel, the manager of Etkinds, a nearby camera and binocular store, said glumly that his sales were down 40 percent. “People leave the shopping center when the lights go out,” he said. “Who wants to be here? The food court gets all smoked up because the ventilators don’t work.

“We were all optimistic about this country’s growth, but this will destroy it. I have sales reps coming into the store because they want me to carry their product. What can I tell them? I’m already cutting inventory.”

Most merchants are losing a day of sales each week. In Alexandra, the poor township just blocks from Sandton, John Kendia shuts his clothing shop with each power failure. “We’ve had the lights go out for four and five hours,” he said. “Who except thieves want to be in the store in the dark?”

Expensive gas-fueled generators can reawaken the light, and worried merchants and wealthy homeowners have quickly bought the machinery.

Now the equipment is scarce. Mark Haycock owns a hardware store in the city of George in Western Cape Province. “I have four suppliers, but they tell me that I’ll be lucky to get more generators in by March,” he said.

For its part, the government is beseeching customers to conserve power, an unfamiliar appeal in an energy-profligate nation. It has announced subsidies for solar-powered water heaters and a program to exchange energy-wasting light bulbs for more efficient ones. Solar-powered stoplights are supposed to free traffic from the whims of the enfeebled power grid.

And of course, the crisis itself enforces a sort of moderation.

“Because of this situation, economic growth just stops,” said Andrew Kenny, an engineering consultant. “In that way, the problem solves itself.”

Gavin du Venage contributed reporting from George, South Africa.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, International, of Thursday, January 31, 2008.