in this area. Unable to improve and maintain critical infrastructure, the country has faced rolling blackouts in four years of the last eight. As a result, the economy has taken a pounding: economist Peter Montalto likened the effects of load shedding over this period to the loss of a major industry.36 In a study of the economic effects of load shedding, Chris Yelland estimates that one month of Stage 1 load shedding costs the South African economy about R20bn. Stages 2 and 3 respectively cost R40bn and R80bn per month. All this could have been avoided. In 1998, the Department of Minerals and Energy warned generating capacity would reach its limit unless ‘timely steps were taken to ensure that demand does not exceed available supply capacity’.37
In April 2016, then Eskom CEO, Brian Molefe, announced to great fanfare that load shedding was ‘a thing of the past’. But this hid the 5% fall in electricity demand in 2016, giving Eskom breathing room to perform much-needed maintenance. The break in load shedding was also because of load curtailment, where large industries reduce their energy load to ease the electricity burden.
In fairness, one of South Africa’s major successes since 1994 is hardly ever touted: a dramatic improvement in our renewable energy production. In perhaps government’s most successful project in the Zuma era, the REI4P programme has succeeded in increasing the amount of use that South Africa gets from renewable energy. Launched in 2011, REI4P is on track to provide approximately 17.8GW of electrical power by 2030. To put this in perspective, the current number of MW gained from renewable sources is currently 6.9MW, and current coal production is about 40MW. This shows what could be done if South Africa lived up to its promise.
Despite all this evidence, figures on poor service delivery don’t paint the full picture. First, they don’t tell us how services are distributed across different segments of the population. To say that 80% of people have access to sanitation may still mean that 50% of very poor people don’t. We simply don’t have rich enough data on how the poorest – and most needy – segments of the population are experiencing services. What we do know is that they are experiencing worse delivery than average, which is already dire. Second, the statistics don’t tell us about the state of maintenance. Government may well have installed a pipe; that doesn’t guarantee it works. Current figures also don’t reflect the response of government to ad hoc problems, nor do they expose the high cost of many basic services: even where services are available, they may be unaffordable.38 Furthermore, some service delivery is the product of the ingenuity of citizens. Across the country, people have dug their own boreholes, connected themselves illegally to the grid, and paved their own makeshift roads. Bradlow highlights this in the case of housing: ‘the creativity behind the construction of shacks and, in some cases, provision of basic services, has been entirely informal and, in the absence of effective formal interventions from the state, markedly resourceful.’39 These acts of citizen-led innovation are often erroneously claimed as government victories in statistical publications.
This is compounded by the abject state of municipal finances. In November 2015, the South African Auditor General (AG) – Kimi Makwetu – released a report showing the ‘improvement’ of municipal financial management. ‘Improved’ performance meant that only 131 of South Africa’s government departments at all levels received a clean audit. Outside Gauteng and the Western Cape, who received 83% and 54% of clean audits respectively, the next ‘best’ performer was the Free State which only achieved a dismal 32% of clean audits.40 Irregular expenditure in the South African government persists at the unacceptably high figure of R25bn – or enough to fund free tuition for every student at South Africa’s universities with much room to spare. Optimism faded when, in 2016, irregular expenditure shot up by 40% to R46bn.41
This is indicative of a broader trend. In 2011–2012 the Eastern Cape showed a regression in public financial administration. The data made for shocking reading. More than 70% of the provincial budget was disclaimed or qualified. This led the AG to suggest that ‘the 2011–12 outcomes once again show that, despite a number of interventions by the AG, auditees are not addressing the root causes when attending to audit findings but are rather addressing symptoms at a reporting level to achieve a better audit outcome for that year’.42 In the five years between 2010 and 2015, unauthorised expenditure tripled to R15bn.43 In 2009, only eight municipalities received clean audits.44 This led to more unheeded statements of alarm from the AG, summed up by a resigned refrain: ‘bad service delivery is due to bad management.’45 In 2012, only thirteen of South Africa’s 278 municipalities and only six municipal-owned entities received clean audits in the same year. No metros achieved this feat, leading the AG to lament, ‘we are seeing the impact of the lack of skills, the slow response of leadership to owning key controls, as well as the absence of managing poor performance and the risks that municipalities continue to face … at the moment these risks are beyond tolerable levels’.46
In 2011, the AG also revealed rampant financial mismanagement in the then Department of Water Affairs. That year, its Director-General and Financial Officer resigned after allegations of financial foul play totalling R1bn. In a review of the department’s finances, the AG complained he could find ‘no system of control over fruitless and wasteful expenditure on which I could rely’.47 An independent analysis of the Department’s finances showed that they had underestimated assets by a whopping R11bn. Worse still, the Water Trading Entity received a disclaimer, the worst possible audit outcome. Five years on, the story was unchanged: in 2016, the Department incurred 1.7bn in irregular expenditure, drawing the condemnation of AG and MPs across the political spectrum.48
It’s little wonder, then, that South Africans deprived of basic services for so long have resorted to protest. Today, South Africa has one of the highest incidences of protest in the world. The majority relate to local service delivery issues. At first, the ANC suggested protests were the result of ANC successes. For instance, in the 2014 State of the Nation address it was said that, ‘the protests are not simply the result of “failures” of government but also of the success in delivering basic services … success is also the breeding ground of rising expectations’.49 President Zuma also said a few years later, in 2016, ‘some of the protests are because people are impatient … they get agitated by the very delivery that they see’.50 But in a study of service delivery protests between 2004 and 2009, Peter Alexander, the South African research chair in social change, found that ‘protests about services and complaints about unemployment are a direct response to the ANC’s failure to advance economic policies benefitting most of the population’.51 In this study, housing was identified as the most important issue, accounting for 17% of protests. The two next most frequently raised issues were sanitation and electricity, both of which accounted for 10% of protests.52
Surely, then, we have reason to doubt the claim that basic services are on the ‘right track’. They are stagnating and reversing at totally unacceptable levels, given how long government has had to fix the problems it inherited. It’s time to lift our heads from the sand and see the living conditions of most South Africans for what they are.
Conclusion
Some may object that there has been ‘progress’, even if slow. But this is a very strange definition of progress. I could not put my response more clearly than Malcolm X: ‘if you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.’53 If you took a test and got 10%, then took it again and got 11% you would technically have made ‘progress’, but you would still have failed. Walking two steps to the moon is ‘progress’. My claim here is that in many cases South Africa has gone backwards, while in others, the ‘progress’ is so utterly insufficient that it does not deserve the name.
All we need to do is look around us. In my everyday life, I have experienced the decline first-hand, whether visiting my family in townships or rural areas. Beyond the slogans, who can say they have seen progress with their own eyes? Who can point to material changes in people’s lives that are sustainable and secure? It’s comfortable to cite figures on ‘electrification’, but even before load shedding, power cuts were regular in South Africa’s forgotten corners. There is a gap between data and life that remains too wide in South Africa. Somewhere beyond the surveys and the reports are South Africans who live in abject poverty, forgotten by government, the media,