Show I I Rotating power outages are an equalizer in South Africa Craig The Washington PostAs Post PostAs PostAs As she drove home to this township known as the Dark City during apartheid because it lacked electricity while Johannesburg's white neighborhoods nearby blazed with light community activist Bongi experienced a delicious moment of irony On that night last month South Africa's debilitating run of blackouts had darkened the gleaming hotels and bank towers of Alexandra's famously glitzy neighbor And Alexandra once synonymous with the squalor blacks were forced to endure under white- white supremacist rule had light I said Wow Vow Reversal of roles recalled 51 I was thinking it was wonderful South Africa's infrastructure designed es by era apartheid-era planners to serve primarily a small white minority is groaning nearly 14 years after the onset of multiracial democracy The new eras era's economic growth has brought an unprecedented rise in traffic jams and housing demand and power shortages have become so widespread that they have idled vast swaths of the continents continent's most important economy for hours at a time in recent weeks But here in Alexandra Alexandr the pain of what the state-owned state utility Eskom calls load shedding the temporary cutting off of power to some consumers has been tempered by a sense that the nations nation's bounty and burdens are finally being experienced more evenly Lo Load d shedding is the great leveler who also is a an n artist said with a laugh We should call it load sharing because we are sharing this thi s inconvenience The blackouts are th the e result of surging demand deman d and stagnant supply exacerbated by a failed faile d push toward privatization n that made it difficult for Eskom to build the power plants needed to serve new customers in this country of 44 million From 1997 to 2005 demand rose 30 percent faster than supply in South Africa according to US U.S. Energy Department statistics The problem has worsened dramatically inthe in inthe inthe the past two years analysts say About 70 percent o of South Africans now have access to electricity roughly double the percentage under apartheid Eskom predicts supply shortages will last for the next five to seven years until several new plants can be built There are a whole bunch of users who weren't users before and that's changed demand enormously said Kevin Bennett director of the Energy Research Center at the University of Cape Town The disruptions over the p past st two months have been massive Traffic lights have gone dark Factories have abandoned motorized assembly lines leaving workers to make products by hand Thousands of stores without electricity have been forced to turn away customers and throw throwaway throwaway throwaway away spoiled food Even Evena a performance of the Lion King musical was canceled The blackouts are a reminder of the past for residents of Alexandra which has nearly people jammed into a three-square-mile three warren of concrete houses apartment blocks and tin shacks snacks Among the onetime residents of the township are former fonner president and N Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela jazz trumpeter Hugh and the late Mozambican president Samora Machel Houses gradually were electrified here herein herein herein in the turbulent as townships such as Alexandra boiled over ver with apartheid anti-apartheid protests and violence In this climate the process of installing power lines was slow residents R Th iki 11 Ii t h hIi Ii di dij j I Washington p Post st photo by Craig Lifelong resident Jonas Hoffman l owns a bar in Alexandra South Africa where electrical blackouts have forced him to repeatedly close the bar early say with connections at first going only to newer fancier homes Today concrete poles festooned with thick black cables can be seen almost everywhere in Alexandra even among the hand-built hand shacks whose residents illegally tap electrical lines to fo bring power into their r rhomes homes Refrigerators and microwave ovens also have become common in Alexandra and many houses sport rooftop antennas or even small satellite dish dishes s. s But power lines are no longer a reliable source of power The lights go out several times a week here generally for a few hours at a time Shorter outages happen sporadically almost every day forcing residents to use candles and smoky old paraffin stoves for cooking Some say they are nostalgic for what now seems like a pleasant hiatus between the installation of electricity and the arrival of load shedding It was something good then for us changing lifestyles something beautiful said James 46 a factory worker living in a tw two room room concrete- concrete block home reachable only by walking down narrow dirt alleys The recent outages he said are taking us back to those old times We have to start again Lifelong resident Jonas Hoffman 61 has repeatedly been forced to close his Alexandra bar early Not only do the World Cup 98 video game and Playboy Anniversary pinball machine stop working but he loses power to the refrigerators that keep the beer cold Sometimes we say Why dont don't they just take the electricity away said Well just use ice like before Funeral home owner Linda Twala 63 spent much of the past few days looking for a generator massive enough to keep the refrigeration unit in iii his MU 31 up Outages also interrupted a board meeting of an an Alexandra development group he belongs to forcing members to resort to candles for light and an old kerosene stove to make tea Like Twala enjoyed the turnabout one recent night when Alexandra had power and other traditionally white suburbs did not But after a few hours we didn't have electricity in Alex either he recalled So were we're sharing the same problems |