Africa has great potential, and it will still have great potential in 50 years’ time, quip the cynics. But although the continent has boundless resources, impressive economic growth rates and enormous reserves of oil, gas, coal and hydro-power, the energy sector seems to prove the naysayers right almost every time.
Much of the continent has no electricity or, more recently, suffers intermittent ‘load shedding’ power cuts that have become a source of inconvenience and annoyance, the butt of jokes and an economic time bomb. The power outages are affecting every layer of society, from Johannesburg’s plush shopping malls, faced with a shoplifting free-for-all unless they evacuate their stores because of security device failures, to the small-scale farmer in the bush in Zambia, who has saved up for a television and was becoming enfranchised by watching the nightly local news, but now has to revert to candle power.
