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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:21AM (1 child)
Its education, not IQ that drives evolution. Education will sooner or later also increase the country IQ, but education is the root that makes a country work.
So even low IQ, low education people can bring lot of benefits by educating then (yes, it's slow, it'll takes some time always) and then their children, where you will see the full benefits of it.
If you ignore the parents education, probably their children will also suffer from bad education (after all their parents did "well" without it) and you do not fix the problem
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @06:16PM
Education is just another innovation made by smarter people. When you have less smart people you can't develop these innovations as easily.