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Once the highly infrastructure developed economic powerhouse of Africa, South Africans these days are more interested in the outlook for rolling blackouts. The country’s most-downloaded app provides schedules, alerts and forecasts for power outages.
Eskom, the state power monopoly, is struggling to generate enough electricity to meet needs, and has re-introduced a byzantine system of rotating outages known as “load-shedding.” On February 11th a whopping 4,000 megawatts of power, enough to power some 3m households, was cut from the national grid to prevent it from collapsing. Some businesses have bought generators and battery systems; others close during outages. In big cities, there is chaos at rush hour as traffic lights go dark. The blackouts suit copper-cable thieves, who can steal without fear of electrocution. And when the electricity is switched backed on, substations sometimes explode, resulting in secondary outages.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2019/02/21/why-the-lights-keep-going-out-in-south-africa
[paywall: you can see the whole article in 'anonymous view' through startpage.com]
More on the situation:
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/267263-south-africas-electricity-system-is-falling-apart-and-it-is-much-bigger-than-just-eskom.html
How to bring back the lights in South Africa?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:13AM (2 children)
The death toll of capitalism [wordpress.com].
Grand total is an order of magnitude higher. Disgusting!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:00PM (1 child)
Technically you can't lay that at the feet of capitalsm because it was mercantilism. If you mush definitions together as you have you wind up with absurdities like claiming the Roman trade in slaves was capitalist, and that shogunate Japanese villagers were proto-communists.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:24PM
Ah. It's a good thing that the USA Constitution doesn't include something like a three fifth clause then.