South Africa’s recent history of electrification is more complicated, and it has been the subject of fierce debate as the current blackout crisis has dragged on for several months.
In the last years of apartheid, before a democratic government was elected in 1994, electricity reached only a third of South African households, few of them black.
Under the African National Congress — whose leaders have governed ever since, often promising free electricity and other services as part of the nation’s new democracy — 85 percent of households now have electricity, a remarkable accomplishment by any standard.
President Jacob Zuma has forcefully rejected any blame for the energy crisis. The strain on the grid, he said, resulted from the burden of bringing light to millions of black households without power under white-minority rule.
“It is a problem of apartheid, which we are resolving,” he said this year.
But energy experts say that these households, many of them low-income, consume little electricity. Instead, they said, the shortages result from frequent breakdowns at aging plants and, most critically, the delayed construction of two new facilities.
As far back as 1998, a government report warned that without new capacity, the country would face serious power shortages by 2007. A year later, in 2008, South Africa suffered its first rolling blackouts.