Cape to Delta

“The government has confessed to an “electricity emergency” and has begun a program of rationing for industrial users. This is a mortifying turn for a country that considers itself the powerhouse of Africa and resists comparisons to its underdeveloped, famine-plagued neighbors. But electricity shortages, now expected to be a fact of life for the next five years, are more than an embarrassment. They threaten continued strong growth here in a nation that accounts for a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output and ranks among the world’s top 25 countries in gross domestic product.

Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa’s own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

One of this nation’s largest employers, the mining industry, virtually halted production for four days last week because Eskom, the dominant, government-controlled utility, could not guarantee enough power to ventilate and cool the deep underground shafts. [...]

“The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event,” said Anton Eberhard, a business school professor at the University of Cape Town and an energy expert.

[...] Though the government insists it will not allow the power crisis to jeopardize future industrial projects and interfere with plans to play host to the 2010 World Cup in soccer, many experts consider the power shortage a lamentable foul-up likely to undo some of Mr. Mbeki’s economic accomplishments.

“The warnings were well-known, but the government was too aloof and arrogant to act,” said William Mervin Gumede, the author of “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the A.N.C.” (Zebra Press, 2005, with a revised edition in 2007). “This is simply disastrous for the economy. You can throw out all the goals of 6 percent economic growth.”

South Africans are appalled by the daily interruptions to their lives. Workers sit idle, televisions flick into darkness and silence, elevators stall between floors, gas stations cannot pump, cakes remain forever half-baked. Every intersection with disabled traffic lights becomes a four-way stop, with drivers in each direction maddeningly delayed as the endless lines of cars inch forward.”