For a moment, there was so much hope. Apartheid was over. South Africa had, for decades, essentially operated as two different nations superimposed on the same landscape. There was the white nation—wealthy and westernized—boasting a similar, if not higher standard of living to that of Europe due to its similarly strong and diversified economy. Then there was the black nation—impoverished and excluded from that wealthier white nation by a legally enshrined system of segregation. It felt like Europeans had just built an insular outpost in Africa—that’s to say, it felt like what it was. But finally, following decades of internal struggle and mounting international pressure that reached a climax with the waning need for an African anti-Soviet ally, the nation’s new president announced the release of apartheid-era political prisoners. Most of these prisoners were members of the African National Congress—the strongest anti-apartheid force—including the famed and beloved Nelson Mandela. As time marched forward, Mandela negotiated with the existing government to ensure a peaceful transition—something some thought impossible—as the structures of apartheid were stripped away. Then, in South Africa’s first truly democratic election, the most symbolic moment yet: Nelson Mandela, the former prisoner, was elected President of South Africa. In the view of most, at that moment, South Africa was brimming with potential. It had massive mineral wealth, it had a diversified economy, it had a large highly-educated workforce—as the continent rose, the world hoped and believed that South Africa could be the poster-child of the potential of African economic and human development. If the white and black nations could truly integrate into one, the country was well on its way towards being considered a social and economic equivalent to, say, New Zealand—another former British colony in the southern hemisphere that managed to transition into a self-sufficient, high-income, multicultural society. Crucial to this, perhaps the greatest task that Mandela and his ANC party was faced with was how to build a black middle class. The legally enshrined systems of segregation were easy to do away with—they could be reversed in an instant—but what was left was a massive population trapped in the cycle of poverty. Simultaneously, there was the wealthy white population at the center of the current economic system who would not tolerate a simple redistribution of wealth. So the ANC had to thread the needle—correct for historical wrongs while maintaining most of the status quo. Initially, they were fairly successful at this. The beginnings came naturally as black party members moved into many of the stable, well compensated public sector jobs previously held by the white minority, then the trend permeated elsewhere as qualified individuals excluded only due to the color of their skin entered every other newly desegregated profession. Formerly impoverished townships like Soweto metamorphosed from slums into sprawling suburban neighborhoods filled with rows of single-family homes and ample assortments of upscale restaurants and bars. And crucially, this wasn’t due to wealth moving in, but rather wealth being built—the white population of Soweto stayed at just a fraction of a percent. More broadly, nationwide, according to one study’s definition, the black middle class grew from just 1.7 million in 2004 to 4.2 million just eight years later. As perhaps the strongest validation of South Africa’s progress so far, the nation was selected to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup—an event that had never-before taken place on the African continent. This sent a message. It said that, of anywhere in Africa, South Africa was the place most capable of hosting the world’s second highest profile sporting event. Inevitably, naysayers arose—they said the nation couldn’t possibly build the stadiums in time; then when they did, they said the stadiums were shoddy and would crumble apart; then when they didn’t, they said that fans wouldn’t possibly show up, fearful for their lives in crime-riddled South African streets, but they certainly did. As the sound of vuvuzelas engulfed the TV broadcasts, the world was captivated by the host country and it was now thought of in the same vein as Germany or Japan or France or any of the other World Cup hosts. But eventually, Spain bested the Netherlands; the TV broadcasts wrapped up; the lights of Soccer City Stadium switched off; the fans flew home; the years marched on; and time revealed an uncomfortable truth: while the government was able to emulate stability for the short period—they were able to create a facsimile of the experience in Germany or Japan or France—it didn’t last. Progress had stagnated. It might have actually reversed. This is perhaps best represented by this: the least popular document in South Africa. Nowadays, it’s published each month by the government-owned power utility, Eskom, and it outlines the schedule of when each municipality will have their electricity supply shut off. After decades of deferred maintenance on a power system mostly designed to service the white minority, plant failures have escalated this issue into a chronic mismatch between supply and demand. That creates this dissonance: a country that, in parts, looks as developed as the most upscale areas of Europe, yet is plunged into darkness as frequently as its poorest African neighbors. These days, a lack of load-shedding is the exception: so far in 2023, there have been 5,858 hours when the grid has failed to meet demand. But while perhaps the most palpable issue that creates some of the most sizable domino effects, South Africa is increasingly failing to provide the absolute bare-bones of public services. In 2018, Cape Town nearly became the first major city anywhere to run out of water as the city’s reservoirs ran dry during a drought—a crisis created in part by a lack of government foresight—but more broadly and regularly, the share of households with access to drinking water has started to decline in recent years. Water infrastructure is crumbling and just recently, dozens have died on the outskirts of Pretoria, the administrative capital, due to cholera—a disease virtually eliminated from the modern world thanks to modern sanitation systems. The nation’s homicide rate is skyrocketing—climbing up towards its all-time high—and the police and judiciary appear entirely ineffective at combating this as just 20% of murders end up with anyone in court, and even then, just 31% of the public has trust in the courts as the legal system breaks down as well. South Africa’s state-owned freight rail monopoly, Transnet, is too collapsing—in a very similar situation to Eskom—as it closes lines, struggles to keep locomotives running, and carries 25% less cargo today than in 2015—a massive constraint for the country’s lucrative, export-focused industrial sector. South African Airways, which was separated from Transnet in 2006 but remained government-owned, fully collapsed and ceased all operations in 2020 before restarting with new financing as an embarrassing shell of its previously globe-spanning self. No matter where one looks, one struggles to find any case where a government service is improving in South Africa and the closer one looks, the more sense this starts to make. When the blackouts began in 2007 they were little more than random, local, short-lasted, inconvenient irregularities. Then, in the January heat of the southern summer, they got a lot worse. With demand surging past supply, tourists sat stranded in cable cars high above Cape Town, mines evacuated miners from shafts that they could no longer ventilate or cool, and the South African government declared a national emergency. The panicked power cuts made international news and tipped global markets as the price of gold and platinum shot skyward after announcements that mines might not open for another 6 weeks. It was not the first load shedding that Eskom had mandated in recent months, but it was by far the worst. And it was right on time. In fact, this very moment, when South Africa’s mighty grid was catastrophically overstretched by its consumers, had been predicted to nearly the exact year in this 1998 white paper. As the paper had estimated, should no action be taken to expand power supply in South Africa, the country’s surplus, then sitting at a healthy 25% in 1997, would evaporate away by about 2007. And no action was taken. For all that changed politically and socially with the end of apartheid and the rise of the ANC, South Africa’s grid on the supply side just didn’t. Of the nation’s fifteen separate power plants capable of producing more than 1,000 megawatts, only these two came online during the period from 1990 to 2008, while these two were hastily brought back into production having been moth-balled decades prior when the country was power flush. As heavy industry moved into the resource-rich country and progressive minded policies extended the grid to black and under-privelaged neighborhoods post-apartheid, the margin between power needed and power available first shrank, then disappeared entirely. And why South Africa failed to take action is also explained by this white paper. White papers, by their very nature, are supposed to be, if not concise, as concise as possible: outlining specific problems, providing only the context deemed absolutely necessary, and offering a set of specific options forward. This one runs 110 pages. And as for problems specifically facing the supply side, well, those aren’t addressed until 41 pages in, where the danger of a potential capacity shortage isn’t touched on until bullet point 7, behind issues of fair access to the grid, environmental concerns, and wasteful usage. And as for fixing the problems, there’s this: a vague memorandum to expand access and incentivize competition—recommendations both problematically broad, and puzzling for Eskom officials who had, to this point, maintained an understanding that as long it provided cheap electricity and lots of it, the state would keep its hands off. The paper, like the government that authored it, meant well, it properly identified the host of issues, but it pushed the longer term problems to the back of the line and tried to radically reform through vague and confusing mandates. With the grid and beyond it, there was just too much to get to. Some problems the white paper identified were addressed by the ANC, as grid access expanded and pathways for black managers to work for the utility and black-owned businesses to contract with the utility were created. But other problems were only made worse, as the ANC banned Eskom from building new plants to stimulate competition. Ultimately, only when no competition appeared and the country began eating too far into its margin did the ANC reverse the ban. It was too little too late by then, as the nation that had been known for its energy surplus—selling to nearby neighbors, and producing megawatt hour totals nearer to European averages than those from its own continent—was now energy insecure by 2007, with experts saying that they wouldn’t be able to dig themselves out of the hole for another five years. But more than 15 years on, as additional power plants have belatedly come online, the country’s still in the grips of regular rolling blackouts. Across the 2010s, power capacity in South Africa steadily rose. The problem was, actual production still stagnated—it’s one thing to build the plants, and another to keep them running. In late 2014 and early 2015, it was diesel shortages, drought, and plant maintenance that cut national power production short of demand. In 2019, it was a coal shortage, flooding, and alleged sabotage that led to worse blackouts. Finally, beginning with maintenance issues in 2021, South Africa entered a spiral into its worse outages ever—employee strikes in June of 2022, fires and failures in September of 2022, then more plants failures in 2023 left some cities dark for entire days while, countrywide, blackouts occurred at least once during 200 days of 2022—a new worst. Delayed maintenance, old coal plants, and staff limitations were to blame. But so too was institutional rot. What was supposed to be fixed by ANC overhaul, had fallen victim to the same ills plaguing the ANC itself. With cuts reaching 12 hours a day by the end of 2022, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter privately resigned, a move which nearly killed him when just hours after someone slipped a potentially lethal dose of cyanide into his coffee. In a now deleted interview revealing this close call, the former CEO went on to accuse the ANC of institutional corruption where Eskom served as the feeding trough, with an estimated 1 billion rand or $52 million dollars being stolen from the state utility every single month. While such a number is nearly impossible to verify, it would mark only the most direct loss that such widespread and long lasting blackouts are creating. Post-apartheid GDP Growth, which the ANC had once hoped to average 6% a year, has touched 4 percent only once since power shortages began in 2007, while the South African Reserve Bank has estimated that blackouts from 6-12 hours a day rip about 204 to 899 million rand out of the economy a day—up to $50 million dollars every single day. Eskom, for its part, has raised electricity rates from the global basement yet still finds itself under a mountain of debt and unable to consistently keep the lights on. Confronting this darkness, nearly everyone and everything that feasibly and financially can are working to isolate themselves from the government—to build self-sufficiency from the public services they can no longer rely on. To start, with police response times often stretching into hours, the wealthy rely on the world’s largest private security industry to keep them and their homes safe. More people are employed by this industry, in fact, than the police and military combined. That’s because nearly every expensive home is plastered with a plaque indicating which of the plethora of armed response security companies they’re subscribed to—each of which patrols the nice neighborhoods and shows up far faster than the police. Outside of their homes, the life of the wealthy has largely receded from urban downtowns into places like Sandton in Johannesburg or Sea Point in Cape Town—both of which have organized into city improvement districts where the local private sector groups together and pays into an organization that ensures safety by hiring private security to patrol the streets. And some go further—filling potholes, fixing street lights, cleaning litter, doing all the things that are the responsibility of the government on paper, but that don’t happen regularly or reliably in practice. In sum, the proliferation of private security and city improvement districts allows wealthy areas of the country to maintain a semblance of stability—offering pockets where the day-to-day experience is no different than that of Europe, for example. And this disconnect with their surroundings goes further for the wealthy few as one of the nation’s booming industries is now solar installation. South Africa’s total solar capacity has more than doubled in just a year as those that can afford it are purchasing setups to allow for stable electricity regardless of grid conditions. And as perhaps the penultimate form before emigration, many wealthy residents are preparing to eliminate their reliance on the South African state entirely by gaining the right to live abroad. Those that can obtain Australian or UK citizenship based on ancestry are exercising those rights en masse, while immigration lawyers and nations are increasingly capitalizing on the fears of those that can’t. Neighboring Namibia, for example, is developing a sprawling golf resort in Walvis Bay that includes, with the purchase of a condo or home, a renewable work permit for the country. Malta, St Kitts and Nevis, and others are straight-up selling citizenship in exchange for six-figure so-called “investments” in the countries, and plenty of South Africans with the wealth to do so are taking them up on the offer in order to build-out their Plan Bs. Now, it’s not like South Africa hasn’t been in a similar state before—there was a time when crime was as high; there was a time when electricity access was worse; there was a time when, broadly, it was a less developed nation than it is today. But what makes its current reality so grim is that it’s a state of regression—it is devolving from its previous state as one of the continent’s most developed economies. And this devolution is morphing into a death spiral. Look no further than the load shedding. When the grid is turned off, the lack of dangerous electric currents makes it easy for thieves to remove copper cables and transformers. With each theft, the power utility has to divert resources towards fixing these new issues, rather than the generating issues that are causing the blackouts in the first place. This makes the root cause worse, which makes blackouts more common, which makes theft more common, which makes the root cause worse, and so on. A certain degree of solution could come from the overarching government, rather than simply within the power utility itself, but with each power cut, businesses lose money—production stops, food spoils, thieves steal. The causes are myriad, but the effect is consistent: less income which leads to a lower tax-base for the government which leaves it with less money to bring back around to solve the root cause, which makes blackouts more common, which makes the economic loss higher, which makes the root cause worse, and so on and so on. As all this occurs, quality of life declines for everyone in South Africa—even the wealthy few. They have to deal with higher crime, the inconvenience of load shedding, and a weakening economy and rand exchange rate which makes purchasing foreign-made goods and services increasingly out of reach. With the luxury of choice, the rich are emigrating—bringing with them their wealth, knowledge, and business, which weakens the economy, which makes the government less able to address the root cause, which makes blackouts more common, which makes more emigrate, which weakens the economy, which makes the government less able to address the root cause, which makes the root cause worse, and so on and so on and so on. This death spiral extends society-wide. It is now a central, unique defining feature of the South African state. As the continent’s poverty rate plummets, South Africa’s is rising. As the continent’s human development rates go up, South Africa’s declines. As almost every indicator of human and economic progress improves on the continent, South Africa’s regresses. That’s to say: this isn’t some systematic issue, there isn’t some force of nature making the nation’s decline inevitable, which leaves just one other possible culprit: the government. Support for the African National Congress—once synonymous with support for the end of apartheid—has reached an all-time low. 2021 was the first municipal election that saw their share of the national vote drop below 50%—essentially every issue has only escalated since then, and new stories of corruption and cronyism within the party emerge every day. In 2024 the nation will elect a new national assembly and, with declining support and a growing coalition in opposition, the ANC is on its most tenuous footing ever, and the country could see functional political plurality for the first time in the post-apartheid era. Now, as rhetoric focuses on whether South Africa will slide into failed state status, there is a question worth asking on whether the nation has ever actually been a functional state. There was a time when it seemed more stable and prosperous than today, but that was only the part of the nation that one saw on World Cup broadcasts, the part lived in by South Africans one would meet abroad—more specifically, it was the white nation, while the black nation’s voices were stifled. Through the apartheid era, South Africa failed to provide basic services of an acceptable standard—sanitation, education, police—to the majority of its population: the black population. By many definitions, that is a failed state. So that’s to say, basic services have never been at an acceptable level—the difference is that today, the deficiency is being shared more equally. It would’ve been unrealistic to expect that a standard of living experienced by a privileged minority propped up by oppression itself could be immediately extended to all—it was always going to be a tricky transition. But tragically, the ANC—the institution most responsible for inciting this transition—is now slowing it down. Party members are using their positions to steal from the state, to use oppression to prop up the privileged—the very dynamic they fought to end. Perhaps the sole light in the situation is the fact that it has worsened enough that one can identify that the transition is failing—that a new approach is needed. South Africa still has a starting point that would be the envy of most of its continental neighbors—it still has a robust economy, a relatively high standard of living, and is naturally indebted with valuable resources—so it's not too late to capitalize on its situation and create a thriving state that truly works for all, but the window of opportunity is slowly starting to close. With each passing day, those with the luxury of choice are giving up—they’re packing their bags and driving to the airport one last time. 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