{"id":841,"date":"2008-02-27T08:39:37","date_gmt":"2008-02-27T07:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=841"},"modified":"2008-02-27T08:39:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T07:39:37","slug":"power-failures-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=841","title":{"rendered":"Power failures in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last couple of days, I&#8217;ve blogged about the rising price of fuel in Britain but, down in South Africa, they are experiencing regular power cuts as the publicly-owned electricity provider Eskom fails to keep up with demand. Since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, South Africa has doubled the percentage of its population connected to the grid to more than 70%.<br \/>\nIn 1998, a government report warned that, at the rate the economy was growing, the nation faced serious electricity shortages by 2007 unless capacity was expanded. The government, led by President Thabo Mbeki, who assumed office in June 1999, tried unsuccessfully to induce private investors to build additional power plants. Only recently did it permit Eskom to begin the necessary expansion.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been aware of the power problems in South Africa for some time because of e-mails from friends in the country, but the issue has started to be picked up by some of the world&#8217;s media such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/01\/31\/world\/africa\/31safrica.html?_r=1&#038;scp=1&#038;sq=Eskom&#038;st=nyt&#038;oref=slogin\">this article<\/a> in the &#8220;New York Times&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last couple of days, I&#8217;ve blogged about the rising price of fuel in Britain but, down in South Africa, they are experiencing regular power cuts as the publicly-owned electricity provider Eskom fails to keep up with demand. Since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, South Africa has doubled the percentage [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}