 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to be talking about power cuts. Yes, load shedding as it is called in many parts of the world at a time when the energy prices are rising. But certain countries, of course, bearing the front much more than certain others. In this case, we're talking about South Africa, where in the name of load shedding, there have been massive power cuts taking place across the country. People really struggling, especially the poor. So to talk a bit about this and how this is not just a question of efficiency of a company or whatever, but a much larger structural problem, we have with us Dr. Varsha Jagannath. She's the Deputy General Secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party in South Africa, also a political activist and academic. Varsha, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So Varsha, first of all, I mean, at some level, power cuts seem such a global problem, but media reports across for many months now have been pointing to a situation in South Africa, which is not just normal, which is definitely a very extreme case. So can you maybe first outline what the problem is like in the country right now before we go into some of the reasons? Okay, so, I mean, we've had load shedding since 2007 on and off, but since 2018, it's really picked up. And last year, in fact, we had the most days of load shedding in the country's history. And just in the last two to three months, it's really picked up again with sometimes up to 12 hours a day load shedding. In fact, right now in South Africa, we have more time out of the lights than in the light, so to speak. And this has had a huge impact on various things. There's a variety of reasons for this happening. Some of it has to do with infrastructure. There have not been enough maintenance of infrastructure. There's not enough actual power supply to enter the grid. A lot of that is due to the various times in which when there was attempts to build new power stations and power sources, that was, you know, not followed through due to a variety of reasons, including corruption by the state and its various actors. So we've ended up in a situation where even though we have a grid that services over 80% of our population, we still aren't able to access that actual electricity in a very stable way. And it's really come to a head in the last six weeks or so. Right, Rasha, of course, now in this context, you've written an article also of a globetrotter which people's dispatchers published talking about the crisis. But in this context, of course, a lot of questions being asked of SCOM, which is the provider. So maybe first could you also take us through, you know, the maybe the politics of the past 15 to 20 years, which has actually brought SCOM to a situation where it's not being able to provide electricity to a large number of people in the sense that if someone were to ask what is the reason, what is the larger reason for this crisis? What would you say? Well, I think it's the same sort of crisis that you see around the world, where you have a large extent of neoliberal policies being imposed onto countries, especially countries in the third world, who have very little say in control over their infrastructure program, over how they choose to invest in their countries. South Africa obviously under apartheid had used to boast very cheap energy source. I mean, it's a coal that they're using and were using, but it was still readily available. And that is why our industry was able to actually grow and flourish because there was surplus energy. But there was only surplus energy, obviously, because, you know, 70% of the population did not have access to electricity. But what happened is at the moment of 1994, when there was a very liberal, very open, very democratic constitution put into place, what you see happening is that there was a push to have electrification happen across the population. And that was actually very successful and achieved within the space of 10 years. But there was no, because as that was happening, the neoliberal policies were being implemented. And there was no real infrastructure investment. And so as the grid started expanding, there was no infrastructure investment. And that is due to the policies that the ANC government had taken on. And they are so wedded to this neoliberalism and this neoliberal model, that they don't seem to be able to think outside of it and think about ways in which to invest to keep state owned entities going. There's this push to privatize electricity. And I mean, you know, it's not surprising that many within the society who want to think through this often look at it in a much more suspicious way, claiming that in fact, in various levels, this has been allowed to happen so that we could privatize. And one of the interesting things, obviously, is, you know, the global push to renewable energies, which obviously everyone wants. But the point is that we did not cause the global environmental crisis that we currently have. It's countries of the global north that have done so, and we are now meant to pay the price, and we cannot afford to do so. So one of the things that's been playing out is this introduction of independent power producers who are working with renewable sources of energy, they are selling it into the ESCOM grid, but at a very high price. So electricity is also not only scarce and less and lower than what we actually require, the price is also increasing. Right. So actually, in this context, of course, it's not just a technical issue. It's also clearly a social issue. And as you pointed out in the article, South Africa having perhaps the highest rate of inequality in the world. So in terms of its social impact, how is it actually kind of playing out like that? Well, I mean, socially, it's had a massive impact on people's lives. I mean, economically, the impact is so massive, we've lost up about over 500 billion rand since 2018, which is about 28 billion US dollars. Apparently, the rates of money that the economy sheds per day per load shedding is around 1 billion rand per day per stage of load shedding. Sometimes if you have two massive stages, then you lose 2 billion rand a day. And that doesn't just impact on an economy that's unequal in terms of the rich and the businesses. It obviously has a terrible impact on the poor who carry the burden and the load of this. And what you find in South Africa is this then has an effect on a whole lot of things, especially around women who have to do the labor. In South Africa, like in places like India, we have a very large domestic worker sort of condition and a lot of labor for women is taken up in domestic work. And that becomes even more onerous because things like washing machines aren't working, nothing that's mechanized to assist with the labor of the domestic world is actually working. So that's a burden on women. It also leads to a lot of instability in terms of what employment you can have. And as you know, the people that are poorest in society usually end up entering into work that's very insecure labor. And so immediately when the economy is losing money, those are the first jobs that are shed. And it's had a massive impact on our unemployment rate. Furthermore, we have over 30.4 million people living below the poverty line in South Africa. And we have a population of 60.6 million people. So that's just around half of the population. And they live on about 75 US dollars a month. And what happens is they also, when there is electricity, can't really access electricity because the average cost of electricity for a poor household is around between 60 and 90 dollars per month. So a lot of their salary or earnings or grants that they are receiving will go towards the use of electricity. And from lots of studies, including one that was done in Pakistan on low shedding, it found that it also has a huge psychological and mental impact on people's lives. And you also find that happening. Very much so in this context, of course, when you look at how SCOM has performed in recent times, there have been some attempts by the government for instance, others to sort of blame the unions for raising this kind of, raising the issue saying that the union's industrial action is what is causing these problems, et cetera, et cetera. So why is the government taking this kind of a stance and what really is the way path forward for SCOM and the government right now? It amazes me how much the trade unions get blamed for everything in society. This is a pattern that has developed in the South African state recently, in the paristatals and by capital, who just, and the bourgeois media really laches on to this. There's no understanding of the role of the trade union in society. It's been vilified massively. I mean, we know this has happened since the rise of catcherism in the world. But in South Africa, we had a very different relationship to trade unions. But that's changing now with this rise of neoliberalism really entrenching itself within the South African landscape. And there does not seem to be in the bourgeois media space any sort of gap for the trade unions to actually get their say and to be represented on what it is they're actually doing. So when we go on strikes or when there's labor action in order for people to have better wages, which happens probably for two days of an entire year or every three years, they are blamed for the fallouts in Escom. When just logically, you have to see there was no strikes for the rest of the year and they're still low-shedding. Right now, there's no strikes and they're stage six low-shedding. So they just been made into scapegoats when they have very real legitimate concerns. And furthermore, the trade unions have actually offered really good proposals on how to resolve this issue around low-shedding. There's also a huge policy and a lot of work that the trade union I work with, the National Union of Metalworkers of Africa, NUMSA, has actually provided in terms of having socially owned renewable projects, something that will democratize it rather than firstly take away jobs and increase electricity prices, which is what the IPPs would effectively do. Right. But does the government have any other solutions right now? And I accept privatization has there been an attempted consultation, any sort of vision that they put forward? No, they seem to be completely visionless in every possible way, not just when it comes to Escom. In South Africa at the moment, they seem to be visionless in every possible way in terms of any aspect to do with our society, whether it's the economy, whether it's Escom, whether it's education, whether it's crime, any of that. And they found themselves incredibly flat footed. Just yesterday they announced a new board. By the way, the chairperson of the board is also a chairperson of a private bank and one of the four largest banks in South Africa. And they've not really pushed any sort of socially owned agenda. And they don't seem to, they seem to be following the same method. And they also have stated that if they had to follow the new emissions act around coal burning, we might even have up to 15 hours a day load shedding. And they don't know how to resolve this matter. And they also don't seem to know how to address this in a sustained manner for the future. Thank you so much, Wajda for talking to us and explaining the nature of the crisis in South Africa. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.