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South Africa has a highly energy intensive economy. For every dollar’s
worth of goods and services it produces, it uses three times more energy
than the US and six times more than Japan. The state-owned power company,
Eskom, prides itself on being one of the world’s largest, supplying vast
amounts of electricity to the mining industry. South Africans also boast
their electricity is the world’s cheapest.

At the same time, the country has a fuel wood crisis. Millions of South
Africans live in poverty and have no electricity. In many places, the hillsides
have been stripped of all trees and huge erosion gullies, or dongas, grow
larger by the day. People are forced to burn dung and maize husks for cooking.

Inequality, of course, is not unique to South Africa. But there can
be few places where it is so dramatic – even in energy terms.

In Britain, the average domestic consumption is about 4000 kilowatt-hours
of electricity a year. In South Africa, the domestic consumers use 9000
kilowatt-hours a year, but only one-third of the population – including
most of the 5 million white people – has electricity. The majority of the
country’s 30 million black people has no supply of electricity.

The situation, however, is changing. As the notion of political reform
took root among the white population, the government realised it could not
ignore the needs of the black majority. Some black communities are now connected
to the grid, and plans to supply the rest are under discussion.

South Africa’s energy inequality is a direct consequence of apartheid.
Successive governments encouraged ‘separate development’ for the black population
and drove millions to live in nominally self-governing ‘homelands’. These
areas – as poor as anywhere in rural Africa – are cut off from South Africa’s
resources.

For those people able to afford the move, the alternative is the townships
on the fringes of white cities. Townships used to be regarded by the white
authorities as temporary housing areas for black workers and not permanent
settlements, so services such as power were rarely provided. This policy
ignored the fact that many people lived their entire lives in these towns
and squatter camps.

Some 25 per cent of township residents do have electricity. The rest
must use paraffin or coal for cooking and heating, and lamps and candles
for light. Many use car batteries to drive TVs and tape players.

Coal burning in homes produces serious indoor pollution, and contributes
to the chronic smog which hangs over the conurbations of the Rand – the
area around Johannesburg and Pretoria – all through the winter. Surveys
carried out for The Weekly Mail have highlighted the plight of children
in these townships who suffer more respiratory complaints than would normally
be expected.

People in the townships can certainly afford electricity. Those without
it spend about 1.5 times as much on fuel for cooking and lighting as equivalent
black households which have electricity.

For years, Eskom showed no interest in electrifying the townships. But
in 1987, it announced a policy of ‘electricity for all’. This is qualified
by Eskom officials to mean ‘electricity for all where it will pay for itself’,
which cuts out most of the rural sector.

Cynics claim the campaign is driven mainly by a need to make profitable
use of surplus generating capacity built up when the economic outlook was
not as bleak as it is today. Charles Dingley, senior lecturer in electrical
engineering at the University of Cape Town, says South Africa has an electricity
generating capacity of 32 400 megawatts and peak demand of 22 000 megawatts.

Eskom claims to be connecting new domestic customers at a rate of more
than a million a year and that this is as fast as the process can go. Under
present pricing systems, newly electrified areas have to bear the cost of
installation themselves, leading to some townships having to pay 50 per
cent more per unit than nearby white towns. The company insists that pricing
is out of its hands.

But Eskom has devised much cheaper, ‘appropriate’ delivery systems for
small domestic users. ‘In the past, South Africa has followed closely the
very high-technology approach, similar to Britain and Europe. We are now
looking at simplified and cheaper technologies,’ says Anthony van Heerden
of Eskom. Cabling around townships, for example, is often just an inelegant
bundle of overhead wires. ‘Not so aesthetically pleasing as going underground,
but a lot cheaper,’ he says.

And a person wishing to run no more than a few lights, a hotplate and
a TV can be supplied via a ‘Redibox’. This is simply a metal box with plug
sockets and a light bulb fitting, costing as little as 150 rand ( £31).
Fitting a Redibox is much cheaper than installing a conventional, Western-style
supply, which costs at least 1000 rand. Also, a Redibox can bring a supply
to a wooden or tin shack or a mud hut where conventional wiring would be
impossible.

The Redibox means users must have cables running all around the house
from the one point, although the box does contain a circuit breaker to guard
against accidents. Van Heerden insists that Rediboxes and bundled cables
do not make up a second-class system for black people. ‘There is no loss
of safety at all.’ He adds that the expensive European-style standards set
for electrification of white areas are ‘for elegance’.

More contentious is Eskom’s introduction of prepayment meters, for which
electricity credits are bought in a shop and programmed onto a magnetic
card. The system was designed to prevent theft and to insulate Eskom against
bad debt.

However, for people with no formal political voice, such bad debts have
become a well-used political weapon against the authorities. Township communities
have run up huge debts, generated by organised nonpayment of electricity,
rent and service charges, and used them to negotiate concessions such as
the lowering of rents. The introduction of prepayment metering removes one
such means of protest and, in some townships, has met with strong resistance.

There are also other constraints. In some areas, violence has made Eskom
reluctant to send in its engineers. And engineers are hard to come by. The
impact of protest action taken by young people in recent years has not been
confined to the political arena: ‘The school stayaways, organised by young
people protesting against the system, have lost us two generations of employable
people. However much money we spend, it will be more than just a few years
before that is remedied,’ says Charles Dutcowitz, head of the University
of Capetown’s Energy Research Institute.

Outside the townships, in rural areas, electricity is seen as a priority
after food, shelter and clean water. Even the poorest families spend money
on candles they would prefer to spend on electric light. Electricity can
save women the hours they must spend collecting wood. In many parts wood
is so scarce it must be bought with other fuels.

A huge capital outlay would be needed to extend the grid to these widely
scattered communities, an outlay that would probably never be recovered
through the tariff at its present level. In other developing countries,
finance for rural electrification is regarded as necessary for development.
But in South Africa, the white establishment speaks of ‘subsidy’.

‘It wouldn’t be fair to ask a man 1 kilometre off the grid to pay the
same for connection as a man 100 kilometres off the grid, would it?’ says
van Heerden. This answer fails to take into account that many black people
are only in remote rural areas because of the homelands policy.

With or without subsidy, the technology needed to supply rural South
Africa is hotly debated. Dingley maintains that Eskom still needs to take
the plunge into appropri-ate technology for rural electrification. ‘If Eskom
were prepared to look overseas at low-cost rural electrification they would
find extending the grid is nothing like as expensive as they think,’ he
says.

Eskom and the Energy Research Institute, say that the most cost-effective
way to supply electricity to many of these communities is to employ stand-alone
electricity generators. For example, solar panels and wind generators with
diesel back up, and small hydro schemes are all being considered, though
not many have been installed.

Solar panels are certainly expensive and the electricity they generate
costs much more than grid electricity in urban areas. However, solar panels
are thought to be more appropriate than wind or diesel generators because
they need little maintenance.

But even with public investment, forecasters estimate that it will take
at least 20 years to bring either the grid or a local generator to everyone.
And no matter how liberal-minded the government, electricity will have to
compete with water, road building, education and health care for state funding.

Cecil Cooke, director of the alternative technology unit in the Transkei,
the Xhosa homeland, does not think rural people should wait for ‘development
from above’. He argues that plans drawn up by Eskom and other agencies are
still too high-tech and expensive. He wants cheap, low-tech, generators
and imaginative financing made available, so that people can buy them independently.

Solar panels or micro-hydroelectric turbines alongside small streams
could be used to supply not only domestic needs. They could also power electric
fences to protect trees and crops – crucial in a country where the livestock
eats any vegetation it can, and where wooden fences tend to go in the stove.

Electric pumps can power irrigation systems. Even simpler are hydroram
pressure pumps, which harness the flow of a stream to mechanically lift
water to homes and fields. Many of these devices would pay for themselves
by increasing crop yields.

Unfortunately, such practical ideas have not always been readily accepted.
‘When I first worked here in the Transkei I had a lot of difficulty with
appropriate technology. Black officials here objected to low-tech solutions
as just another white trick to keep black people down. I had to fight like
hell to say these are transitional standards, not all that the black man
deserves or is going to get,’ says Cooke.

In the meantime, the vast majority of black people in the countryside
continue to rely on wood for fuel. In theory, every village is supposed
to have its own woodlot. Under the ‘Betterment’ programme, begun in the
1950s, land was divided into economic units and black people were obliged
to move into villages. Here, in theory, the state would provide schools,
water, electricity and other services. (In most places these facilities
have yet to arrive.) Sites were also designated for woodlots, but the government
planners placed them apparently arbitrarily on homes or on the best agricultural
land. Few were planted.

Anton Eberhard, fuel wood expert at the Energy Research Institute, believes
there is no longer sufficient land available for people to grow their own
fuel in this way. And, if anything, the situation may get worse. In June,
President de Klerk repealed the Land Act, ending the policy of reserving
most of the land for whites. Land will now go to the highest bidder and
although blacks now have the right, they may not have the means to buy the
land they farm.

Eberhard believes the only hope in the short term is for a massive tree-planting
campaign. He says that open grazing and maize fields should be hedged with
fast-growing trees such as leucaena, wattle and acacia. This agroforestry
approach should bring further benefits, by slowing soil erosion, enriching
the soil with nitrates and leaf litter and by providing fodder for livestock.

In Kenya this kind of agriculture has been promoted for many years.
In South Africa a handful of such projects are under way – a measure of
their low priority. The country has a long way to go to bring power to all
of its people. And the implicit assumption is still that, eventually, everyone
will be able to live like the whites.

But this is a recipe for environmental disaster. White South Africans
use electricity with extravagance. The Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington
DC, describe them as the ‘world’s worst greenhouse offenders’. Eskom, which
generates most of its power in coal-fired stations, says that because it
is funding township installations, it has no capital left to fit flue gas
desul-phurising equipment. It also argues that, in any case, it does ‘more
to cut pollution by electrifying townships’.

The global need for energy conservation almost inevitably means that
people will have to cut down their energy use and that the price of electricity
will rise to fund more environmentally friendly power generation. And, if
equality in South Africa is to mean anything, electricity consumers will
have to pay more to provide power to the millions of black people still
going without. The fact that they will have to pay to end apartheid is already
meeting resistance among some white South Africans and may prove to be a
bitter pill for them to swallow.

Kate de Selincourt is a freelance writer who has travelled widely in
South Africa.