It might be in arrears, but Soweto is a victim of the Eskom crisis, not the cause

On Tuesday and Wednesday, people of Soweto and other low-income communities across Gauteng protested against Eskom. Among a number of issues, they were protesting getting cut off from electricity as a result of not paying the rates they owe to Eskom.

Many in the media are blaming Soweto residents for the Eskom crisis, claiming it is being driven by their nonpayment of electricity.

However, what many are missing is that Soweto’s nonpayment is more a symptom of the Eskom crisis than the cause.

With electricity prices having risen 400% over the past decade, it has become harder for poorer South Africans to afford electricity.

That price increase has been caused predominantly by Eskom, not by Soweto.

If we want to see the biggest cause of debt in Eskom, we must look at coal. We have recently built two mega coal power plants, Medupi and Kusile, against the protests of civil society, which argued they would be an economic and environmental disaster.

Civil society was right. Those already unreliable plants are producing some of the most expensive energy on Earth and have been plagued by cost overruns and delays.

With their delays and overruns, Medupi and Kusile have cost us about R400bn and added R240bn to Eskom’s debt. Without that R240bn debt, Eskom would actually be pretty much in the black and have a sustainable level of debt, as Eskom’s own officials admit.

We’re all paying the price of those projects, both through their massive initial costs and through the vast amounts of interest that need to be paid to service the debt.

We can compare that R240bn in debt with the supposed R18bn Soweto purportedly owes. If we examine the figures, then for small power users — that is, residents — the debt is only R13.6bn as of the end of 2019. What’s more, most of that debt was not unpaid electricity fees, but was interest on unpaid fees. If we take away that interest, which is arguably illegitimate, the amount is R6.4bn owed by ordinary residents of Soweto.

Soweto’s debt is still a considerable amount, but it is a relatively small drop in the sea of costs caused by corruption, mismanagement, and white-elephant coal power plants.

To put Soweto’s nonpayment further into perspective, we can also consider that Eskom corruptly signed on to R14-trillion in overpriced coal contracts in 2008, according to a Special Investigating Unit report. Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”, an order of magnitude larger than Soweto’s nonpayment.

Our reliance on and mismanagement of coal is also the major driver behind load-shedding. Our poorly maintained and ageing coal fleet needs to be replaced. The most cost-effective, job-creating, and environmentally sound way of doing that is with renewable energy.

Energy justice activists in Soweto have long been calling for a transition to renewable energy, as they are once again doing during the current protests. However, the ANC government is set on locking us into more expensive, economically and ecologically disastrous coal, nuclear, and gas.

Even though the ANC’s own economic modelling showed renewables to be better, it uneconomically forced new coal, gas and nuclear into the Integrated Resource Plan, rather than embracing a just transition to renewable energy.

So, my fellow South Africans, we are understandably angry about the Eskom crisis we are in. However, let us be careful about turning our anger against the people of Soweto. Let us turn it to the corruption and mismanagement that is most responsible. Let us turn our anger to the building of coal plants that are not only plunging us deep into hundreds of billions of rands in debt, but are also driving the climate crisis and causing deadly air and water pollution.

To quote Malcolm X: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

So, yes, we must fix the Eskom crisis. However, disproportionately scapegoating the wrong people helps serve the interests of those truly behind this crisis. It deflects from their responsibility for the absolutely disastrous situation they have created for you, for me, and for the people of Soweto.

It’s long past time we held Eskom accountable and unlocked a just transition to more affordable renewable energy.

Lenferna is a Fulbright and Mandela Rhodes scholar who holds a PhD on climate justice from the University of Washington and serves as a climate justice campaigner for 350Africa.org