There is a sunny side to blackouts

“Oooh, there’s no ’lectricity, there’s no ’lectricity, no ’lectricity …”

Remember that song, circa 2008, when the country almost had a collective heart attack from a couple of hours of load-shedding a week?

Ah, those were the days, my friends. For we have, depending on who you believe, already hit stage 8. 

Whether, as Eskom says, it’s “only” 7,000MW-and-something and not 8,000MW that were shed, is largely irrelevant. We are at the stage (sorry) where a national blackout was apparently the next thing that would happen as the entire grid tripped, plunging the country into weeks of darkness while the utility brought its power stations back on line. Now, apparently, we can go as high as stage 16. 

These numbers are now pretty meaningless, except that they may result in a thrashing for the misruling party at the polls in 2024.

Back in 2008 the government was, of course, distracted from governing by messy internal squabbles. That upheaval culminated in the election of the man who would sign off on Medupi and Kusile, the two power stations meant to lift the country out of darkness but which to the average South African eye look like the ridiculous coupling of a unicorn with a white elephant.

Still, it could have been worse. South Africa might now have been on the hook for many billions of rands’ worth of dodgy, still-to-be-built Russian nukes, and independent power producers could still have been waiting for Godot as the government dithered on letting them supply energy to the grid.

Meanwhile, 150-million kilometres away, the one power station that doesn’t fail continues to bombard us with about 38,460 septillion watts a second without relying on conveyor belts, wet coal, crooked contractors or downtime for maintenance. It just runs and runs and runs.