> Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor
Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.
What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.
> What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights?
This is easy to say as a non-South African, but the results of your elections seem to be highly regional[1], especially around Cape Town v.s. the rest of the country. If you then compare that to South African power stations[2] you can see that they're clustered around high population regions.
Then you have the SAPP[3] where nations in Southern Africa have interconnected grids. E.g. Namibia[4] is impacted by South Africa's blackouts, but not to the point of their own supply shortages mirroring Eskom's outages, and they're planning to become independent.
So if a country of 2.5 million to your north can run their own semi-connected grid, can't parts of South Africa form their own local experiments in grid management using their own tax base?
I've got no idea how hard that would be to pull off politically, but presumably easier than "convince the entire country not to vote for the ANC", or "full independence for the Cape" etc. We're only talking about energy infrastructure.
Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.
What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.