This is great – we now look like complete fools to the rest of the world (if the ANC wasn’t already doing that for us by word of mouth to our friends over the oceans). VICE has gone and done a nice little piece about our collapsing electricity status, and it makes me want to crawl into a hole and hide.

Let’s see what they had to say…

• Eskom’s “admitted that it is currently facing a ‘risk of collapse of its entire power network'”.
• Last November a coal silo collapsed at an Eskom power facility that contributes 10 percent of South Africa’s energy and caused the site to lose 1,800 megawatts of its energy capacity.
• During the 2008 crisis South Africa’s platinum mines, which contribute approximately 78 percent of the worlds circulating platinum supply, [Eskom]were forced to shut down their operations. This led to a spike in global platinum costs and even a devaluation of the South African rand.

Shall we carry on? I think not.

I’ve been one of those who so far runs around the house turning on solar fairy lights and lighting my L’Orangerie scented candles, making tea on my gas stove with my lovely Le Creuset kettle (it is pink, FYI).

What does SA have to do now? We need (well, the government, because they want to own Eskom) $22 billion “to refurbish [the] decrepit systems and build enough power infrastructure to meet current demand”. #nopressure

Surely the only way we’re going to manage that is from foreign investing? And I’m pretty sure that’s going to leak in like a drying riverbed. Our national treasury “announced in late January it would begin selling off assets” but they only plan on getting any of this money end June 2015, and it’s only going to be $870 million. Way off target.

I suggest reading the VICE article by Johnny Magdaleno so you can fully see what the world thinks of SA.

[Source: VICE]