So I'm a month late with the resolution to blog more but, hey, living gets in the way. January was full of travel to Mozambique, Zambia and Swaziland and then a thousand daily details that don't need to be detailed here.
This doctored image is one of the funnier ones I've seen that combines South Africa's recent power crisis with the ever-present doom and gloom about the country's ability to host the World Cup in 2010. The power crisis is a problem of massive proportions: the country's largest mines - gold, platinum, coal - were shut down for four or five days while Eskom, the power parastatal, scrambled to devise a plan that preserves power to crucial facilities - like hospitals - but the plan has yet to be fully realized. At home, we had blackouts every day for a week last week and, before that, several times every week. Eskom has promised that blackouts will be a part of life here for at least the next five years; they're just hoping to become a bit more reliable about it while cities and businesses try to adapt. Traffic lights are the primary immediate hurdle besides the daily multi-million dollar mines. I returned from Maputo, Mozambique to Pretoria recently by bus and the trip was smooth until we arrived in Johannesburg on a Thursday afternoon. The power was out, the traffic lights were out, a huge rainstorm was underway and rush hour traffic was gridlocked like nothing I had ever seen. The bus did not move for 10 minutes at a time. The trip to Pretoria by bus usually takes 45 minutes if traffic is moving. This time it took three-and-a-half hours. Cities are now planning to install solar panels onto the lights and I even heard that Johannesburg is going to install switches into some 200,000 homes that will allow the city to cut power to hot-water heaters when there is a power shortage. In northern Pretoria, furious and stranded train commuters vandalized several cars. Their anger was legitimate but they just reduced the number of commuter train cars. The fault for this crisis lies with the government which restricted Eskom from building new capacity in the late '90s while the government pondered new energy policy (i.e. - how to attract private investment). Then they changed their mind but the economy and power demand had steadily grown for years by then and Eskom didn't raise the alarm about the looming shortage.
It's going to be quite a year here with big political scandals - the president of the ANC, and thereby the presumptive president of the country in 2009, is facing a corruption trial - and power outages.
Thankfully, the wine is good and grapes grow without electricity.
