Professor Renfrew Christie wrote a book titled Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa. This is a highly recommended book, especially for anybody interested in the, um, anthropology of electrification.

In 1988, when I was working for State-owned power utility Eskom, it had just emerged from a long spell of chairmanship management by Jan H Smith, who, at the 50-year celebration of Eskom’s establishment, said: “As an objective outsider, not blinded by the commanding position which the mining industry occupied in the South African economy, founder Charles Merz drew attention to the need for the exploitation of the natural resources and the establishment of basic industries in various parts of the country supplied with power from centrally situated power stations. This was in direct contrast to the official railway view that industries should be established near the electrified railway line, and was, in fact, a forerunner to the decentralisation of industry, a policy which successive South African governments came to adopt in subsequent years.”

Smith was referring to the Merz report, a document which set out the basis for the establishment of Eskom. The thinking at the time was this: electricity has the requirement to serve the mining industry, the railways and the exploitation of natural resources. It was noted by those who followed Smith (John Maree and Ian McRae) that Eskom became large and bureaucratic and neglected the requirements of many citizens. While many industries were electrified and electricity was cheap and outages unknown and load-shedding unheard of, many residents had no electricity. McRae changed the Eskom policy to electrification of previously neglected residential homes and to provide low-cost electricity for economic growth: Electricity for All. The electrification of townships was a big task. To electrify a whole residential area is expensive and will only return a profit after some time; naturally, only provided that the residents pay their power accounts. Given the choice, many residents didn’t pay and, when a technician came to disconnect them, they chased the technician away. The next option was prepayment meters, which are easily bypassed. Alternatives are simple illegal connections. Thus, revenue from residential supplies was poor. In all this, to keep revenue streams running, Eskom raised its tariffs from dirt cheap (one of the lowest costs in the world) to not so cheap. Then some madness took over in the 2000s. Eskom tariffs became more and more complex – in effect, penalising industry and mines for using electricity during peak periods and raising residential tariffs to new heights.

In Christie’s book, you will find that, for much of the twentieth century, the focus on electrification was in industrialisation and the attracting of the electrical manufacturing industry to South Africa. There is no longer that focus. Many mines have shut down (gold mines from a total number of 112 in 1990 to 84 now) and many industries have closed (for example, Saldanha Steel).

Naturally, Eskom tariffs have not been assisted by being forced to buy renewable energy and then taking the National Energy Regulator of South Africa to court to recover money due for this.

The term ‘downward spiral’ comes from an aircraft which is heading groundward in a spin and it is an apt term for where the energy market is going; the more electricity prices go up, the more people steal or bypass. The more electricity prices go up, the less industries survive and the less the investments in manufacturing. The less the investments, the less the employment. The less the employment, the more people will steal or bypass.

It is probably time for government to take a hard look at the energy system: let us forget wind turbines (intermittent power only available 30% of the time) and get government investment into energy-consuming industries which will cause electricity tariffs to reduce. It is no good government giving money to enterprises which have run out of money due to corruption or mismanagement. If we don’t do something about the downward spiral of energy revenues, we’ll go back to using generators.