Like many politicians in South Africa, Geordin Hill-Lewis knows citizens are being let down.
The 35-year-old was elected mayor of his hometown of Cape Town in November as the country hit an unhappy milestone.
In 2021, 14 years after power cuts first started becoming routine, the country logged 1,136 hours of blackouts – a new record.
“I’m not sure what’s more appalling – that we have this power crisis 15 years later, or that by now everyone finds it almost kind of normal,” says Hill-Lewis, whose opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party has long held sway in the Western Cape and is also advancing in other metropolitan areas.
He and others are now trying to take matters into their own hands. Cape Town has announced plans to start procuring some of its own power supplies from independent generators, bypassing coal-dominated state-run monopoly power firm Eskom, whose struggles to meet demand is crippling the economy.
“I just had a realisation that it’s not going to be sorted out anytime soon and if we wait around for Eskom to sort it out, it’s going to do untold economic damage,” adds Hill-Lewis. “It’s not really good enough for us to just throw our hands up and say, it’s a problem.”
His move was enabled by reforms to the power market introduced last year by president Cyril Ramaphosa, of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. It set the stage for a challenge to Eskom’s dominance.
While Ramaphosa’s decision gives opponents such as the DA more room to win residents’ support and has pitted him against some of his own party, it has raised hopes in some areas of a turning point in the problem that has held South Africa back.
The path ahead remains fraught with difficulty, however, amid concerns over fairness and access to energy, as well as worldwide tensions over the pace of the shift towards cleaner energy and where that leaves South Africa’s coal mining heartlands.
“I have always thought of it [solving the energy struggles] as two steps forward and one step back,” says Christopher Vandome, research fellow at the Chatham House Africa programme, based in Cape Town. “And you are not quite sure how long those steps are.”
As one of the world’s largest utilities, Eskom runs a fleet of 15 ageing coal-fired power plants with a nominal capacity of up to 47,000 MW meeting up to 90pc of the country’s power demand.
But since 2007 it has struggled to meet that demand, weighed down by what is now more than $25.4bn [£19bn] of debt accumulated over the years amid high costs, steep interest payments, under-investment and allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
That year it introduced periodic ‘load-shedding’ – cutting supplies to certain areas when it cannot meet demand, giving residents sometimes as little as four hours’ notice before they are left in the dark.
The cuts have forced shutdowns among mines and industry and pushed other businesses away, helping to contribute to South Africa’s record unemployment rate of 34.9pc or almost 75pc for young people.
