JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — Across Africa, people know what to do when the lights go out: Life chugs along thanks to generators, candles, wood fires, paraffin lamps and windup radios.
But South Africa prides itself on being a kind of "older brother" in sub-Saharan Africa, more modern, more industrialized and richer than the rest. So the blackouts that are paralyzing the continent's biggest economy for several hours a day have led to an undercurrent of soul-searching: Does this mean we have the same problems as the rest of Africa?
In a nation with infrastructure more developed than in the rest of the region, the outages hit hard: Complicated heart operations have come to a standstill, and intensive-care nurses have had to ventilate patients manually. Winemakers can't keep vats of fermenting grapes at a constant temperature, endangering their entire harvest. At one point, hundreds of tourists were stranded until almost midnight on an aerial tramway at scenic Table Mountain in Cape Town.
But perhaps nothing brought home the scale of the crisis like the government power utility Eskom's warning to foreign investors with millions to sink in big industrial and mining projects: We don't want you here until at least 2013, when new power stations will be built.
"I think the damage is huge . . . and now South Africa looks just like Africa. Maybe it will take 20 years to recover," said Trevor Gaunt, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, who was part of an expert panel that warned the government about the impending problem in 2000.
The power crisis amounts to the most critical economic misstep by the ruling African National Congress since President Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela nine years ago, and occurs at a time that South Africa is facing considerable political uncertainty because of an intense rivalry between the two factions of the ANC. When Gaunt's panel warned that demand for power would exceed supply by about 2006, Mbeki's government ignored it.
"People didn't want to hear it," Gaunt said in a phone interview. "If politicians had heeded the message of specialists instead of taking political decisions, we could have avoided this."
As the "engine room" of Africa falters, some are warning it could drag the whole southern African region down.
