An array of sunscreen brands in the discount pharmacy dazzles with its bright packaging sparkling under spotlights. Then everything goes black as the store’s lights fail.

For a foreigner this is alarming, but not to locals.  They continue shopping by phone flashlight as they wait for some distant diesel generator to kick in. And without comment, they navigate their way to the checkout, guided by the distant glow of cash till screens.

Welcome to South Africa and its rostered rolling black outs.  They call it “loadshedding” because the timed outages are a form of electricity rationing that reduces the load on the country’s badly broken generation system.

South Africans, who live in the most industrialized country in Africa, have had their electricity rationed in this way since 2014. The outages have increased in number and duration since then with up to three a day.  Traffic lights don’t work.  Freezers must be kept shut.  Cooking by gas is the only way to guarantee a hot meal. Businesses struggle to survive.

South Africans appear to accept the inconvenience with nothing but a shrug.  There is even an app for it – telling you exactly when the lights will be off in your region, and for how long.

The biggest difference between the industrialised South compared with the North is the dependence on heating.  While it does get cold, South Africans do not generally use central heating, relying instead on individual heaters and fires.  Their dependence on air conditioning is much greater.

Much as Putin has exposed the vulnerability of Europe’s energy systems and supercharged the drive to renewables, the South African experience of “loadshedding” goes a long way to undermining the universal fear that our world will stop when the lights go out.

When Europe faced its Putin-created energy crisis this winter, the biggest fear was blackouts.  But as South Africa has proved, being forced off grid is not that scary. You learn to cope.

Reasons

The reasons for South Africa’s rolling black outs are many, varied and well documented.  Here’s a summary.

Other than a small amount of natural gas, South Africa is entirely dependent on its abundant deposits of high-quality coal. During the apartheid era, the government overcame sanctions on oil imports by making liquid fuels from coal, using a German technology (Fischer-Tropsch synthesis) perfected by the Nazis.

A nationwide electricity grid was built (started in the late 1920s), powered by coal-burning power stations, clustered mainly nearby vast coal deposits in the north of the country.  A single nuclear power station, Koeberg, operates near Cape Town, the only nuclear plant in Africa.

The state company running the country’s electricity – power generation (95%), grid and rural distribution – is called Eskom, the Afrikaans translation of Electricity Supply Commission. According to Bloomberg, Eskom produces 42% of South Africa’s climate change gases and a vast amount of damaging sulphur emissions.

Because of the abundance of coal and the political power of the coal lobby, renewables were effectively ignored despite a wealth of wind and sun in the vast country.

Eskom is in a terrible mess, with debts of $13.9 billion, much of it created by endemic corruption and bankrupt municipalities that distribute electricity locally but don’t pay their bills.

The Eskom rot began under apartheid when the then government failed to invest in new power stations.  The neglect continued and accelerated under successive African National Congress (ANC) governments. Poor strategic planning, political meddling, lack of investment, rampant crime, and corruption at all levels are the overriding causes of the current crisis.

And there is no short-term fix. Corruption is now infused throughout the South African economy, especially in state-run organisations and enterprises.  Criminal cartels operate at all levels in Eskom, using political influence, fraud and violence to steal money and materials from the company.

One example is the diversion of high-value coal which is trucked from the mines. Drivers are bribed to take their load to an unofficial transfer station where the coal is swapped for building rubble, metal and low-grade coal of equivalent weight.  The truck then continues to the power station, passes the weight test and offloads its useless contents.

Not only does the power station lose its high calorific coal but the metal and other debris destroys the crushers that feed the furnace.  Repairs are carried out by the same cartel that caused the damage.  And so, the cycle continues.

Other ploys include the sabotage of essential equipment to be repaired at inflated prices by one of the cartels, and the stealing of copper and aluminium wire on an industrial scale when the power stations are disabled. The metal is melted down and exported, often with the support of corrupt police.

The former CEO of Eskom, André de Ruyter, who survived alleged cyanide poisoning while in office, resigned because he said he could not fix a system that was so dysfunctional. He was fired while serving his notice for accusing leading politicians of being involved in the corruption. (For further details on the woes of Eskom and corruption in South Africa, read the Daily Maverick).

Coping

People living in extreme poverty (official unemployment rate over 40%) mostly cope without electricity anyway.  Given their multiple life challenges, a blackout has limited impact.

Businesses, and individuals who can afford it, use petrol or diesel generators that kick in when the lights go out.

Load shedding has boosted the sale of solar systems and storage batteries. While expensive (all imported using a devalued currency) installers are enjoying boom times as homeowners clamber to go off-grid.

The irony is that it has taken bribery and corruption to kickstart home solar in a country that has assiduously ignored the free and abundant power shining down on it.

Of course, poor air quality in urban areas, caused largely by coal and word burning, has only got worse from fossil fuel generators roaring during loadshedding.

Lessons

While South African businesses continue to be harmed financially by the outages, domestic life continues much as normal. The blackouts have become institutionalized.  Diesel generators keep restaurants and shopping centres running.  For the middle classes, home battery packs power Wi-Fi and televisions.  Inconvenient, yes, but not catastrophic.

This could change for the worse if the length and pre-planned frequency of the blackouts increases with people left without power for days rather than a few hours at a time. While possible, that does not look likely in the immediate future.

But given the breadth and depth of corruption and criminal activity, it will be decades and wholesale reform before power generation and distribution returns to what passes for normal in an industrialised country.

The one bright light is the future of renewables.  The country is gifted with some of the world’s best conditions for industrial solar and wind power generation. It now understands the benefits and is being helped to make the necessary investment by international funds to fight climate change.

Already the vultures are circling to steal the cash.  Whether the state can reform itself quickly enough to exploit nature’s gifts is open to question. Meanwhile, South Africans continue to live in hope while planning for the next outage.