Eskom. Electricity and Technopolitics in South Africa

International audienceAfrica’s leading producer of electricity, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, is also a vertically integratedmonopoly owned by the South African state. Eskom was shaken in 2008, when it was obligedto introduce ‘load shedding’, or rolling blackouts, and again in late 2014. Since then, therehas been an accumulation of grid dysfunctions, scheduled blackouts and blackout warnings.Trying to understand how and why one of the pillars of South African state capitalism isnow in distress, the authors of this book argue that the so-called electricity crisis is in facta public monopoly crisis. Moving beyond technical aspects, they explore the relationshipbetween state power and Eskom before, during and after apartheid. From this perspective,they suggest that the public utility’s current technical and financial troubles are illustrativeof the weakening of its technopolitical regime, of how national institutions have governedEskom’s technological development, and of the pursuit of political goals in the productionof electrical power. Without a clear industrial strategy during the 2000s, Eskom became apowerful tool of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, as well as a neopatrimonialsystem that generates profits captured by the ruling party’s elite. As a result, the crisis inEskom shakes the whole political edifice.Inefficient, and with its finances increasingly under scrutiny, the existence of this stateownedenterprise as a monopolistic public utility is regularly the subject of debate. Theauthors propose that the solutions for dealing with the crisis all point in the direction ofde-integrating Eskom and allowing its current technopolitical regime to enter a planned ornatural decline