Posted on 01/16/2015 4:59:41 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa As schools reopen here in the coming days after the Christmas break, South Africans are braced for a surge in the power cuts that have plagued the country since early December, and the rolling blackouts could spell trouble for the ruling African National Congress at the ballot box.
During the week, schools, factories and offices will move to full capacity, drawing on an already-fragile national grid. And in the heat of the Southern Hemisphere summer, air conditioners will be turned on full blast.
A state-owned company, ESKOM, has the monopoly to produce more than 95 percent of the nations electricity but, since 2008, a lack of maintenance and delays in opening new plants have led to a growing gap in supply. Last week large swaths of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and the capital Pretoria were left in the dark as ESKOM cut transmission for hours at a time to prevent a collapse of its network.
Residents in poorer areas, a constituency likely to be fiercely contested in upcoming elections, claim they have been unfairly targeted.
Our lights go off for many hours, sometimes all night, said Charlotte Ngwenya at Olivenhout, a sprawling settlement with hundreds of wood-and-iron shacks halfway down the 40-mile highway between Pretoria and the commercial base of Johannesburg. People are poor here, and no one cares if we are in the dark, she said.
Mrs. Ngwenya works as a cleaner in the plush suburb of Waterkloof north of Pretoria, where diplomats and government ministers enjoy large homes with lawns and swimming pools.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Opposite racial makeup. About 85 / 15 there and about the opposite here.
Beyond that, I thought their tax base was much smaller, with a lot more of their population living at bare sustenance levels.
The powerfull and their cronies make all the bacon and pay virtually no taxes. It has become as corrupt as the rest of Africa, not unlike the direction DC and our government has been going.
Somehow the call to censor news of murder of whites doesn’t get headlines.
You call them snide little racially bigoted comments.
I call it free speech.
Freeeeeeeeeeee Nelson Mandela.
Having been there and visited and kept track of South Africa even during the Apartheid era I would say on a timeline our two countries are not that far apart, they just have more third world areas and more third world people. We import the third world massively and then expect magic to turn them into first world people, yeah right. And the Afrikaners are IMO 1st World +, while most White Americans are proletarian in nature.
My Afrikaner PH said you from the Cape did not speak proper Afrikaner, what is up with that?
Stupid, because you leave the whole tyranny of Political Correctness in place while it slowly strangles the life out of people via the imposition of yet newer and more stringent taboos against inquiry, thought and then speech.
I understand; I just thought (at least until recently) that we had a much larger tax base (in terms of proportion).
Name calling?
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