JOHANNESBURG The gated residential area formed by white European-style houses is closely guarded. Tsakane Bok sends us a four-digit code, which the guards at the gate check from their own system, only then does the gate open.
Halfway Gardens in the north of Johannesburg is a typical middle-class residential area. The houses are two stories, with one or two new cars in front of each.
Walls separate, but with even the poorest South Africans, the residents of Halfway Gardens have one common scourge: power outages that repeat several times every day, lasting two to three hours.
The application tells you when the electricity goes out
It’s a little after six o’clock and the night in Johannesburg is getting dark. Tsakane Bok, the mother of a family of four, welcomes us with a smile in her kitchen. He takes out his cell phone and clicks open the application of the state electricity company Eskom.
– From this we can see what time the electricity is off. We always know a week in advance when the power will go out each day.
The electricity in Bokie’s home has already been cut twice today, first for four and a half hours at night and then for two and a half hours in the morning. The third, two-and-a-half-hour power outage of the day is about to begin.
A total of nine and a half hours without electricity. An ordinary Wednesday.
A corrupt power company
South Africa is the continent’s most developed economy, but in recent years it has been plagued by corruption that has spread deep into the administration.
President Jacob Zuma during the regime, management positions in state-owned companies were distributed on political grounds and professional managers were either ousted or left the companies themselves.
One of the worst affected has been the state electricity company Eskom. The power outages started already in 2008 and the situation has only gotten worse every year. Eskom produces electricity mainly with old coal-fired power plants, whose maintenance has been neglected for years.
– There has been no investment in Eskom. Everyone just wants their share of Eskom’s profits: local governments that sell electricity to consumers, subcontractors that sell low-quality coal, corrupt politicians, Tsakane Bok, the list goes on.
Each government in turn has come up with a plan to save Eskom, but the situation has kept slipping in a worse direction. In September of this year, the situation took a record-breaking turn when one power plant after another fell off the grid.
On the eight-step alarm scale, the alarm reached the sixth level, for the first time in the history of South African power outages.
– The eighth level would mean that there is no electricity at all, the whole country is in darkness, says Tsakane Bok.
A gas stove and battery lamps save
Ordinary people have been helped only by adapting to the situation. Tsakane and Mapena Bokin a family of four has better than average opportunities for that, as each has a permanent job and regular income. Tsakane works at the Finnish embassy and Mapena at a traffic insurance company.
But they haven’t been able to afford a backup generator either. Hours without electricity can be overcome when the lamps have been replaced with rechargeable bulbs, the wifi router has a backup power source and the electric stove has been changed to a gas one.
Bulbs that store electricity cost about four times more than regular ones, so the Bokie family only has them in some of the kitchen and living room lamps. When a power outage strikes, all normal lamps go out and even the bulbs that charge automatically dim.
– In their light, however, we can see enough that we don’t bump into each other, Mapena Bok laughs.
The traffic lights are dark, the phone doesn’t work
The effects of power outages are not limited to the inside of the home’s walls. Tsakane Bok works about 30 kilometers away in Pretoria. He knows what kind of difficulties a power outage can cause, for example on a work trip.
– Of course, the traffic lights go out and the traffic gets congested. There you sit in a traffic jam, trying to call home, but the phones don’t necessarily work either.
In the middle of Tsakane’s interview, what the electricity company Eskom has promised will happen happens.
There is a battery light in the girls’ room
13 years old Fifi Bok has never lived a time without power outages, 18-year-old older sister Tumi Bok only the first four years of his life.
When the electricity goes out, they turn on a small battery light in their common room. The batteries of the laptops have been remembered to be charged, and their screens give the room a little more dim light.
According to Tumi and Fifi, the most boring thing about living with power outages is that they take away freedom.
– You have to plan your life according to them all the time. Is the laptop charging, is the cell phone charging, is the battery light charged?
– Studying in the dark is boring, that’s why I often take a nap during a power outage and continue reading when the electricity is back on, Tumi Bok says.
A year ago, optical fiber and a backup power source for the wifi router were purchased for Bokie’s house. So the worst phase in the sisters’ lives is already behind them.
– At the time of Corona, it was really depressing and boring. When the electricity went out, so did the internet connection. The school was attended remotely, and the lesson was often interrupted when the electricity went out at school or at home.
Ministers do not suffer from power cuts
Frequent power outages could be best dealt with if a backup power generator was in use. But in Tsakane and Mapena Boki’s house there is none of that.
Generators are expensive and fuel prices that have risen due to the war in Ukraine also do not encourage investment in backup power systems.
Tsakane Bok works in the capital, Pretoria, and knows that there are areas where there are no power cuts.
– The areas where the ministers live. They all have generators and they don’t even know what it’s like to live with power outages many times a day. Therefore, they also do not have the political will to really solve this problem.
Eskom turns on the electricity
You get used to the dim feeling at Bokie’s home surprisingly quickly. The blue flames of the gas stove in the kitchen create an atmosphere when Tsakane prepares spaghetti and very familiar meatballs for family and guests.
We sit down at the dinner table, Mapena looks for a slightly better bottle of red wine in the wine cabinet for the celebration.
And it’s the place for a little celebration when the electricity company Eskom turns on the lights at Halfway Gardens. Twenty minutes early this time.