Mandla Mabuza looks out of his front door at Africa’s biggest power station and wonders if it is killing him. “Especially when the wind is blowing this side it affects us so badly,” Mr Mabuza says, as he gazes at a fume-belching tower of the 4,000-megawatt Kendal coal-fired plant in South Africa’s Mpumalanga region, barely a kilometre from his home in Khayalethu. “We are suffering,” the 46-year-old ex-coal miner says. It is not just the air. Khayalethu is without running water, and its houses are unsound — an effect of the coal mine next door that is blasting away to feed Kendal’s boilers. Khayalethu only exists because another colliery swallowed the residents’ old homes a decade ago. This is the outskirts of eMalahleni, South Africa’s “place of coal” — the heartland of Eskom, the state power company that generates 95 per cent of the nation’s electricity, mostly via coal plants such as Kendal. Over a decade of corruption, creeping blackouts and debt that has risen tenfold since 2007 to $30bn, Eskom’s problems have deepened under South Africa’s governing African National Congress. Khayalethu shows just how desperate the battle to keep South Africa’s lights on has become. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance, has blamed ANC misrule. He said in December that it had turned Eskom into a “national power utility that is on its knees, threatening to take the entire country down with it . . . the single biggest threat to our nation’s future.”
FT 10th Feb 2019 read more »