Stage 6

South Africans are spending their mid-winter evenings in darkness and with a low-tech life, unable to turn on lights or heaters, cook meals, or charge their phones.

Load shedding became more severe late last month (June) as strikes at the nation's electricity supplier, Eskom, rendered coal facilities unable to run or undergo maintenance. As a result, the frequency of power outages has left people without electricity two to three times per day, lasting up to four hours at a time. For many, this means that they will leave the house in the mornings without electricity, and return home to another planned outage.

To combat this, some South Africans have turned to alternative solutions to power their homes. However, this is only really an option for the wealthy minority of South Africans who can afford to have a solar powered battery backup system or a petrol generator installed. Even so, these are not permanent solutions as one can realistically only use these to power parts of a home at a time - mainly kitchen appliances - before the battery pack is used up if the generator runs out of petrol.

Meanwhile, one in five South Africans live below the poverty line, and for them even trying to get gas or paraffin to power a stove to cook or boil water has become increasingly more challenging. Already coping with high unemployment and economic inequality, families in townships and informal settlements struggle to prepare meals at night, while children do their homework in the dark. In addition, the situation is only made worse with global inflation continuing to soar as economies recover from Covid-19 and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

So, with plans for renewable energy alternatives moving at a glacial pace, and the decreasing quality of life for many South Africans since the promise of a bright future after the dismantling of the Apartheid government, citizens' frustration only grows as the nation is plunged into darkness.