https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/africa/south-africa-power-blackouts-intl-cmd/index.html
feb 1 2023 Johannesburg, South Africa
Car crashes, opportunistic criminals, rotting food, decomposing bodies, bankrupt businesses, and water shortages. Welcome to life under South Africa’s power blackouts.
Last week the grim extent of the outages was laid bare when South Africans were advised to bury dead loved ones within four days.
In a public statement, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that bodies in mortuaries were rapidly decomposing because of the unrelenting electricity outages, putting huge pressure on funeral parlors struggling to process corpses.
Known locally as loadshedding, widespread electricity blackouts are carried out multiple times a day by state-owned energy utility Eskom to avoid the total collapse of the grid.
While the country has been experiencing on-off power outages for years, since September 2022 scheduled blackouts have become routine, affecting every part of South African society.
South Africa is notorious for high crime rates, and loadshedding is making it worse as home security systems fail when the power goes out, giving criminals a field day inside unsecured properties.
Policing also becomes harder, with officers unable to reach crime scenes fast enough due to congestion when traffic lights are off.A 2019 report by the South African
Under the ruling African National Congress (ANC), in charge since 1994, Eskom has become synonymous with corruption, crime, and mismanagement.
Institution of Civil Engineering shows skilled engineers have been leaving the country in droves.
Despite spending billions of USD on two huge coal power stations, neither works properly.
Older plants are dilapidated due to a lack of maintenance, and organized crime steals vital coal supplies and cable from the rail lines going from mines to power stations.
