Sylvy Jaglin J
. and Dubresson A.
Eskom. Electricity and Power in South Africa
Editions Karthala, 2016, 228 p. (Coll. Terrains du siècle)
Africa's leading electricity producer, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd is a vertically integrated public monopoly wholly owned by the South African government. Shaken in 2008 by local power outages, then forced to implement rolling blackouts, this national champion was, in early 2015, on the brink of technical disaster and financial ruin. This book attempts to understand how and why a company emblematic of South African state capitalism is now in such dire straits.
The so-called electricity crisis is first and foremost a crisis for Eskom as an organization. Its origins can be found in the relationship between the construction of state power before, during, and after apartheid, and that of Eskom, which was established as a commission in 1923, corporatized in 1987, and converted into a public enterprise in 2001. Beyond the technical malfunctions of the network, which are real, Eskom's neopatrimonial technopolitical regime is reaching its limits.
Deprived of an industrial strategy in the 2000s, Eskom has instead become a powerful tool for Black Economic Empowerment and the redistribution of coal revenues, but the weakening of its technical system is shaking the entire political edifice. The public company, now inefficient, is increasingly contested, and its monopoly, and even its existence, are being called into question.