Electricity South Africa (Eskom)

The last time we visited the Republic of South Africa (RSA), she was in a mess with blackouts. Folks, the situation is the same, and getting worse. As the Americans will put it this is a real ‘snafu”, ‘situation normal, all fouled up’. The national electricity supplier (Eskom) is doing load-shedding, this is a glorified name for rotating blackouts.

Load shedding is what caused Ghana to shut down her kettles at the VALCO smelter in Tema, so the folks in Ghana can imagine what is going on in RSA. A plant is in the middle of melting steel, and the electric juice is shut off; the semi-molten slag solidifies, when the juice starts flowing again, it takes longer time to melt the previously molten slag, much less add anymore material to the vat.

With load shedding, gold extraction from the soil comes to a screeching halt, unless one can afford a standby generator, and with all the gold and diamond mining, you think there would by generators all over the country-side, wrong.

Now you see why I said it is scary for Namibia to be depending on South Africa for electricity.

Folks, this game preserve has more hippos than cheetahs.