Category: Africa

Actually, It Is

Africa

From an irate journo, writing about this year’s Notting Hill Carnival in London:

Ummm well, maybe not “culture”.  How about “lifestyle”?  I mean, when a simple street festival features this kind of festivity:

…well, that’s not exactly a feature of (say) the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, is it?  (Although I may stand corrected sometime soon, in Manhattan.)  Certainly, it’s not a feature of Paris’s Bastille Day (although ditto).

But when you read every week about some cultural activity or festive occasion with a mostly-Black orientation that turns into thuggery and mayhem, perhaps you have to ask yourselves the question.

Meanwhile in the background, old Enoch Powell is laughing his ass off.

When All Else Fails

Africa

…when your backs are to the wall, and when you have neither the money nor the expertise to fix an intractable problem, you can always call on the… Chinese?

South Africa’s newly minted electricity minister followed up a trip to China last week with pronouncements that the Communist Party will provide a solution for the socialist country’s collapsing power grid, which has needed planned blackouts for much of the past year.

This will end up, in typical African fashion, with a lose-lose result — the Chinese will come to realize, as all colonial powers eventually do, that sinking money into Africa is just that:  throwing money into a pit, with no tangible reward.  And South Africa will end up the same as they are now, maybe worse, with a power system that still doesn’t work, only with a mountain of debt to the Chinese loansharks that they have no chance (or intention) of paying back.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of socialists, on both sides.

Travel Advisory

Africa

…not that any sentient human being should want to visit the continent, of course, but just in case you have to (business etc.), please note this little snippet put out by someone or other:

I don’t know what criteria were used — most likely, violent crimes per capita — but what strikes me most is the absence of Mogadishu from the list.  And as for 6 of the top 10 being in South Africa… ask me again why I left.

*Rustenburg is a town of over half a million people, northwest of Johannesburg on the way to the gambling mecca of Sun City.  In the early 1980s our band played a residency at another resort hotel nearby, and even back then we avoided the place.  It’s also the center of the platinum supply (over two-thirds of the world’s platinum is refined there).

Pietermaritzburg has the ironic nickname of “Sleepy Hollow” — clearly, that’s no longer the case — and it’s where New Wife used to live as a young schoolteacher.

Cape Town is generally regarded as the “safest” large city in Seffrica LOL.

Beautiful to look at;  but the closer you get, the worse it becomes.

Don’t get me started on Johannesburg.

Keyword?

Africa

Longtime Reader Jack B. sends me this little snippet with the comment that it should perhaps be filed under “Africa Wins Again”:

Much of the domestic water supply here depends on electricity to pump it from the source to the vast high plain on which the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria sit.

South Africa’s recent electricity woes – with regular lengthy scheduled blackouts – have had a knock-on effect on the supply of water.

“All of our stations, they need electricity, they need power. You have to pump water everywhere where it is needed,” says Sipho Mosai, the head of state-owned Rand Water, one of the country’s main water providers.

“Electricity is really at the heartbeat of what we do and if we don’t have it externally, at least for now, it becomes a problem.”

“At least for now.”  The perfect African answer to an immediate problem which if left unresolved will result in the usual African catastrophe.

Filed under “Africa Wins Again”?

So mote it be.

If you follow the link, you will note that the obligatory dig at “the wealthy” and the concomitant reference to “inequality” occur quite late in the piece, but it’s all there nevertheless.  Sic semper BBC.

No Chance

Africa, Economics

A couple of people sent me this article, and I see that Insty referred to it as well:

South Africa’s power blackouts: Solutions lie in solar farms, battery storage at scale, and an end to state monopoly

Rolling blackouts are costing South Africa dearly. The electricity crisis is a barrier to growth, destroys investor confidence and handicaps almost every economic activity. It has raised input costs for producers and retailers, and has triggered a new round of inflation and interest rate increases.

Any solution will obviously incur cost because it will require the adoption of new technologies, such as large-scale grid-connected that are linked to battery energy storage. But these technologies are expensive.

…which means that none of this is going to happen.  South Africa has been plundered by the Usual Suspects until the coffers are pretty much empty, taxes are about has high as can be levied without causing collapse — what happens when only about 15% of the population is at all economically active, and only 0.5% of taxpayers contribute over 85% of tax revenues.

Even in a perfectly-ordered society (which South Africa isn’t even close to), the job of fixing its power woes would be be pretty much impossible.  As things are… not gonna happen.

And let’s not even think about foreign investment.  While the amounts are quite small, relatively speaking, one always has to factor in corruption — which takes anywhere from 40% to 60% off the top — and loans will never be repaid.  Not even China will countenance investment, given that their previous forays into Africa have been, so far, disastrous.  And South Africa is not Sri Lanka.  They can’t be bullied into compliance with the Belt & Road program because the distances are just too great and the population large and resistant.  (China could say, “Okay, you’ve defaulted on your loan;  give us all your platinum”, whereupon South Africa would just say, “We can’t get the ore to the port;  come and get it.”)

Even if South Africa were suddenly to discover vast resources of lithium (similar to its vast coal reserves), they’d never be able to get the stuff out of the ground.  One would think that in a country with huge gold mines all over the place, a few lithium mines would be no problem.  Alas, the gold mines are now producing only about 40% of what they used to produce under the eeeevil Apartheid Government.

Those giant solar farms the article talks about?  They’d be stripped for parts within a month of installation.  And yes, surround them with security guards — except that the guards would become the new entrepreneurs, flogging solar panels and batteries to householders desperate for electricity.

As with any African catastrophe, there is no workable solution, no possible way that any kind of fix will be either implemented or have any kind of longevity.  If even ESCOM, an established, one-time robust powerhouse [sic]  that once delivered South Africa’s excess electricity to all its neighbors can be mismanaged into complete collapse, why would some newfangled, sophisticated (and fragile) eco-friendly solar system fare any better?

To paraphrase some guy’s earlier words:  let (South) Africa sink.  They deserve no better.