SOUTH AFRICA - ESKOM - LOADSHEDDING

 

As the SUN RISES over South Africa, one thing is certain: the country's power grid is powered by one entity and one entity alone - Eskom. With power plants spread throughout the nation, this state-owned entity is responsible for providing the electricity that powers homes, businesses, and the infrastructure that makes South Africa thrive.

But Eskom is not without its challenges. Years of under-investment and corruption have left the utility struggling to keep up with the demands of a growing nation. Power outages are common, and load shedding has become a way of life for many South Africans.

Despite these challenges, Eskom soldiers on. Engineers and workers tirelessly work to keep the power on, no matter what. It's not an easy job, but it's a crucial one. Without Eskom, South Africa would be plunged into darkness.

The future of Eskom is uncertain. There are calls to privatize the utility, to inject much-needed investment and modernization. But many worry about the impact on workers, and whether a profit-driven model would put the needs of the people second to the needs of shareholders.

One thing is for sure - Eskom is woven into the fabric of South African life. It powers the lights, the schools, the hospitals, and the businesses that make the country what it is. And no matter what the future holds, one thing is certain: Eskom will keep on powering South Africa, come rain or shine, load shedding or not.

 

 

AND DO NOT FORGET THAT as the SUN SETS in South Africa, so does the mood of its citizens. For they know that with every passing hour, their access to electricity will soon be diminished. 

Welcome to the world of Eskom's Load-shedding.

 The darkness engulfs the city like a blanket of fear. The only sources of light now are the flickering candles and the occasional generator that sputters to life. It is during these moments of absolute darkness that one realizes the importance of electricity in modern society.

 For the people of South Africa, this is not just an inconvenience; it's a way of life. Load-shedding, which is the controlled reduction of power to prevent a complete blackout, is a necessary evil that everyone must endure.

 But despite this, the resilience of the people is something to be admired. They make the most out of every situation and find a way to survive, even in the toughest of times.

 In a strange way, Eskom Load-shedding has brought the people of South Africa together. It's a common struggle that they all face, and it has united them in a way that nothing else could.

 So, as the people of South Africa go to bed with the faint light of their candles guiding their way, they do so with the knowledge that they are not alone in their struggle. They are part of a nation that refuses to be defeated, even in the face of darkness.

 

Why the earth quakes – a closer look at what’s going on under the ground

 

A man works his way through the rubble of buildings in Marrakesh, Morocco, after a magnitude 6.8 earthquake on Sept. 8, 2023. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

Earthquakes, large and small, happen every single day along zones that wrap around the world like seams on a baseball. Most don’t bother anybody, so they don’t make the news. But every now and then a catastrophic earthquake hits people somewhere in the world with horrific destruction and immense suffering.

On Sept. 8, 2023, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco shook ancient villages apart, leaving thousands of people dead in the rubble. In February 2023, a large area of Turkey and Syria was devastated by two major earthquakes that hit in close succession.

As a geologist, I study the forces that cause earthquakes. Here’s why some seismic zones are very active while others may be quiet for generations before the stress builds into a catastrophic event.

Earth’s crust crashes into itself and pulls apart

Earthquakes are part of the normal behavior of the Earth. They occur with the movement of the tectonic plates that form the outer layer of the planet.

You can think of the plates as a more or less rigid outer shell that has to shift to allow the Earth to give off its internal heat.

A map of all earthquakes greater than magnitude 5 from 1960 to 2023 clearly shows the outlines of the tectonic plates. USGS/GMRT

These plates carry the continents and the oceans, and they are continuously in slow-motion crashes with one another. The cold and dense oceanic plates dive under continental plates and back into Earth’s mantle in a process known as subduction. As an oceanic plate sinks, it drags everything behind it and opens a rift somewhere else that is filled by rising hot material from the mantle that then cools. These rifts are long chains of underwater volcanoes, known as mid-ocean ridges.

Earthquakes accompany both subduction and rifting. In fact, that is how the plate boundaries were first discovered.

In the 1950s, when a global seismic network was established to monitor nuclear tests, geophysicists noticed that most earthquakes occur along relatively narrow bands that either fringe the edges of ocean basins, as in the Pacific, or cut right down the middle of basins, as in the Atlantic.

They also noticed that earthquakes along subduction zones are shallow on the oceanic side but get deeper under the continent. If you plot the earthquakes in 3D, they define slablike features that trace the plates sinking into the mantle.

Ten thousand earthquake locations from 1980 to 2009 trace the Pacific Plate as it subducts under northern Japan. The top image is a side view showing the depth of the earthquakes beneath the rectangle on the map. Jaime Toro, CC BY-ND

An experiment: How an earthquake works

To understand what happens during an earthquake, put the palms of your hands together and press with some force. You are modeling a plate boundary fault. Each hand is one plate, and the surface of your hands is the fault. Your muscles are the plate tectonic system.

Now, add some forward force to your right hand. You will find that it will eventually jerk forward when the forward force overcomes the friction between your palms. That sudden forward jerk is the earthquake.

A Google Earth image of creeks offset by movement along the San Andreas fault in southern California as the Pacific Plate moves to the northwest with respect to North America. Jaime Toro

Scientists explain earthquakes using what’s known as the elastic rebound theory.

Fast plates move at up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) per year, driven mostly by the oceanic slabs sinking at subduction zones. Over time, they become stuck to each other by friction at the plate boundary. The attempted motion deforms the plate boundary zone elastically, like a loaded spring. At some point, the accumulated elastic energy overcomes the friction and the plate jerks forward, causing an earthquake.

But the plate-driving forces do not stop, so the plate boundary starts to accumulate elastic energy again, which will cause another earthquake – perhaps soon or perhaps far in the future.

In the oceans, plate boundaries are narrow and well defined because the underlying rocks are very stiff. But within the continents, plate boundaries are often broad zones of deformed mountainous terrain crisscrossed by many faults. Those faults may persist for eons, even if the plate boundary becomes inactive. That is why sometimes earthquakes occur far from plate boundaries.

Earthquakes, fast and slow

The cyclic behavior of faults allows seismologists to estimate earthquake risks statistically. Plate boundaries with fast motions, such as the ones along the Pacific rim, accumulate elastic energy rapidly and have the potential for frequent large-magnitude earthquakes.

Slow-moving plate boundary faults take longer to reach a critical state. Along some faults, hundreds or even thousands of years can pass between large earthquakes. This allows time for towns to grow and for people to lose ancestral memory of past earthquakes.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit Syria and Turkey on Feb. 9, 2023, destroyed buildings and killed more than 50,000 people. Mehmet Kacmaz/Getty Images

The earthquake in Morocco is an example. Morocco is located on the boundary between the African and the Eurasian plates, which are slowly crashing into each other.

The huge belt of mountains that extends from the Atlas of North Africa to the Pyrenees, Alps and most of the mountains across southern Europe and the Middle East is the product of this plate collision. Yet because these plate motions are slow near Morocco, large earthquakes are not so frequent.

Preparing for the big one

An important fact about catastrophic earthquakes is that, in most cases, the earthquakes don’t kill people – falling buildings do.

Most Americans have heard of California’s San Andreas Fault and the seismic risk to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The last major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault hit at Loma Prieta, in the San Francisco Bay area, in 1989. Its magnitude, 6.9, was comparable to that of the earthquake in Morocco, yet 63 people died compared with thousands. That’s largely because building codes in these earthquake-prone U.S. cities are now designed to keep structures standing when the Earth shakes.

The exceptions are tsunamis, the huge waves generated when an earthquake shifts the seafloor, displacing the water above it. A tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 had horrific consequences, regardless of the quality of engineering in coastal towns.

Unfortunately, earthquake scientists can’t predict exactly when an earthquake might occur; they can only estimate the hazard.

Jaime Toro, Professor of Geology, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Why humans can’t trust AI: You don’t know how it works, what it’s going to do or whether it’ll serve your interests

 

Do you trust AI systems, like this driverless taxi, to behave the way you expect them to? AP Photo/Terry Chea

There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it?

Why AI is unpredictable

Trust is grounded in predictability. It depends on your ability to anticipate the behavior of others. If you trust someone and they don’t do what you expect, then your perception of their trustworthiness diminishes.

In neural networks, the strength of the connections between ‘neurons’ changes as data passes from the input layer through hidden layers to the output layer, enabling the network to ‘learn’ patterns. Wiso via Wikimedia Commons

Many AI systems are built on deep learning neural networks, which in some ways emulate the human brain. These networks contain interconnected “neurons” with variables or “parameters” that affect the strength of connections between the neurons. As a naïve network is presented with training data, it “learns” how to classify the data by adjusting these parameters. In this way, the AI system learns to classify data it hasn’t seen before. It doesn’t memorize what each data point is, but instead predicts what a data point might be.

Many of the most powerful AI systems contain trillions of parameters. Because of this, the reasons AI systems make the decisions that they do are often opaque. This is the AI explainability problem – the impenetrable black box of AI decision-making.

Consider a variation of the “Trolley Problem.” Imagine that you are a passenger in a self-driving vehicle, controlled by an AI. A small child runs into the road, and the AI must now decide: run over the child or swerve and crash, potentially injuring its passengers. This choice would be difficult for a human to make, but a human has the benefit of being able to explain their decision. Their rationalization – shaped by ethical norms, the perceptions of others and expected behavior – supports trust.

In contrast, an AI can’t rationalize its decision-making. You can’t look under the hood of the self-driving vehicle at its trillions of parameters to explain why it made the decision that it did. AI fails the predictive requirement for trust.

AI behavior and human expectations

Trust relies not only on predictability, but also on normative or ethical motivations. You typically expect people to act not only as you assume they will, but also as they should. Human values are influenced by common experience, and moral reasoning is a dynamic process, shaped by ethical standards and others’ perceptions.

Unlike humans, AI doesn’t adjust its behavior based on how it is perceived by others or by adhering to ethical norms. AI’s internal representation of the world is largely static, set by its training data. Its decision-making process is grounded in an unchanging model of the world, unfazed by the dynamic, nuanced social interactions constantly influencing human behavior. Researchers are working on programming AI to include ethics, but that’s proving challenging.

The self-driving car scenario illustrates this issue. How can you ensure that the car’s AI makes decisions that align with human expectations? For example, the car could decide that hitting the child is the optimal course of action, something most human drivers would instinctively avoid. This issue is the AI alignment problem, and it’s another source of uncertainty that erects barriers to trust.

AI expert Stuart Russell explains the AI alignment problem.

Critical systems and trusting AI

One way to reduce uncertainty and boost trust is to ensure people are in on the decisions AI systems make. This is the approach taken by the U.S. Department of Defense, which requires that for all AI decision-making, a human must be either in the loop or on the loop. In the loop means the AI system makes a recommendation but a human is required to initiate an action. On the loop means that while an AI system can initiate an action on its own, a human monitor can interrupt or alter it.

While keeping humans involved is a great first step, I am not convinced that this will be sustainable long term. As companies and governments continue to adopt AI, the future will likely include nested AI systems, where rapid decision-making limits the opportunities for people to intervene. It is important to resolve the explainability and alignment issues before the critical point is reached where human intervention becomes impossible. At that point, there will be no option other than to trust AI.

Avoiding that threshold is especially important because AI is increasingly being integrated into critical systems, which include things such as electric grids, the internet and military systems. In critical systems, trust is paramount, and undesirable behavior could have deadly consequences. As AI integration becomes more complex, it becomes even more important to resolve issues that limit trustworthiness.

Can people ever trust AI?

AI is alien – an intelligent system into which people have little insight. Humans are largely predictable to other humans because we share the same human experience, but this doesn’t extend to artificial intelligence, even though humans created it.

If trustworthiness has inherently predictable and normative elements, AI fundamentally lacks the qualities that would make it worthy of trust. More research in this area will hopefully shed light on this issue, ensuring that AI systems of the future are worthy of our trust.

Mark Bailey, Faculty Member and Chair, Cyber Intelligence and Data Science, National Intelligence University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The family home in South African townships is contested – why occupation, inheritance and history are clashing with laws

 

During apartheid, black South Africans could not own land – and therefore their homes – in what were classified as “white” cities. In racially segregated townships, living in “family houses” and passing them on depended officially on a range of permits. These were usually to rent from state authorities, but in some cases confusingly to build or buy a house without owning the plot underneath it, which was owned by the state.

A crucial measure in undoing apartheid was transferring ownership of township houses to their long-term residents. In 1986, a few years before apartheid’s end, the law changed to enable outright ownership for black people in urban areas. Subsequently, processes for transfer on a large scale were established.

This massive redistribution of public housing stock, alongside legal change, involved hundreds of thousands of homes. Township houses were now assets. The promise was improved security, rights, and inclusion in the property market.

But change did not necessarily give families greater security. Some family members benefited while others were left vulnerable. That is because the transfers – and the legal definitions of property and inheritance – do not account for how many people understand their homes: collective and cross-generational, available to an extended lineage.

This has led to confusion and heartache for hundreds of thousands of people. That confusion, I showed in a paper in 2021, extended to encounters with state administration, which can become the stage on which family disputes are played out.

As I argued in another paper, with Tshenolo Masha, these understandings of home and kinship warrant legal recognition – indeed, constitutional recognition – as urban custom. Various state officials have taken seriously the collective ownership of family houses, as a matter of customary norms and practice, through administration and court judgments. But they face the rigid limits of existing law.

The family house is central but effectively legally invisible, leaving many people uncertain about what it even means to own or inherit.

Collective home but individual property

For many residents, family houses belong collectively to multi-generational lineages. Often, a group of siblings is at the core – the children of an earlier, typically male, household head. Family members might build extra structures on the site to live in. Or they might come and go, but the home is a place to return to. The family house is defended as customary, drawing parallels with the rural homestead.

By the end of apartheid in 1994, regulation was patchy at best, but the occupancy permits were understood to affirm group entitlement because they listed family members, not just the householder.

In statutory law, at stake is an asset with one or more named owners – an indivisible plot or “erf” of land that includes its built structures. Owners can sell, or they can evict; other occupants have no legal right to stop them. When family houses were transferred, one person was generally registered as owner.

In some cases, the allocation to the registered householder was automatic. In others, there were hearings, but even here residents found their ideas of home and ownership marginalised. A family member would come forward as family “representative” and “custodian” of the collective home. But that representative would typically become the sole titleholder.

In many cases, relatives were unaware that this had happened, or even that an application for title had been made.

Inheritance: an added layer of complexity

Inheritance has added another layer to the problem.

Under apartheid there were separate inheritance rules for black people without wills. These were finally struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2000 and 2004. Magistrates’ courts were replaced by the dedicated inheritance office, the Master of the High Court. Inheritance by the eldest son was replaced by rules for all South Africans, prioritising spouses and children in nuclear families.

Once again, essential redress had the effect of narrowing which relationships would be recognised. When a custodian died, wider family members first discovered that they were not collective owners; then they realised they would not even inherit.

The family house is not a static idea in fights over the home. Warring parties may draw on both customary and legal concepts, sometimes at the same time. Among families that approach the state – and many do not – some subsequently drop out of official process.

There is no simple consensus about who gets what or about how this should be decided.

Efforts to resolve the issue

The family house is contested, yet it is key to arguments about what is fair – based not just on who owns, but on the nature of ownership.

State officials have repeatedly tried to make the system more responsive. In Gauteng province, where Johannesburg is located, housing tribunals were set up in the late 1990s to decide ownership and to broker family house rights agreements. They were intended to prevent custodians from selling houses or evicting relatives. But it turned out that they held no legal water: from the point of view of deeds registration, custodians’ ownership was unrestricted.

In the Master’s Office, where inheritance is administered, kin complain that their family home somehow became the property of one relative. In Johannesburg, officials try to explain the law, while where appropriate querying how title came to be acquired.

What they cannot do, though, is change the rules.

The courts, too, have highlighted problems with rigid law and procedure. In a 2004 Constitutional Court decision on inheritance, a dissenting judge warned that customary understandings of home and custodianship risked being sidelined by standardisation.

More recently in 2018, automatically upgrading householders to owners was declared unconstitutional. Men were usually documented as householders under apartheid, and gender discrimination was extended by giving them exclusive property rights.

Other judgments recognise the spirit of collective belonging and access, and they stop individuals from taking the house out of the families’ hands by inheritance or sale. But they cannot make legislation, so they send the question of who owns the house back to a tribunal.

Once again, solutions are restricted to workarounds.

Towards legal recognition

In 2022, the Shomang judgment in the North Gauteng High Court called for legally recognising the family house.

A sufficiently flexible notion of family title would be challenging to work out, and doubtless the basis for countless disputes. Surviving spouses need as much protection as the siblings in a lineage. But it would enable administrators and judges to mediate disputes in terms recognisable to the families involved. And to offer more than ad hoc workarounds.

Maxim Bolt, Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

South Africa can’t crack the inequality curse. Why, and what can be done

 

South Africa is ranked one of the most unequal societies in the world. The Conversation Africa spoke to Imraan Valodia, the Director of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, about inequality in South Africa.

Has income inequality got worse in the last 20 years?

According to the most recent data, South Africa has the highest income inequality in the world, with a Gini coefficient of around 0.67. The Gini coefficient is a widely used statistical measure of how income is distributed in the population of a country. It takes a value between 0 and 1. A coefficient of 1 indicates perfect inequality – where one individual in a country would earn all the income in that country. Conversely, a coefficient of 0 is an indicator of perfect equality, where the income of the country is distributed perfectly equally among all its citizens.

South Africa’s Gini is exceptionally high. A number of other African countries have high Ginis too. For example, Namibia’s is 0.59, Zambia’s 0.57 and Mozambique’s 0.54.

Countries in Europe, especially Scandinavian countries, have much lower Ginis. They range between 0.24 and 0.27. Among the developed countries, the US has a high level of inequality with a Gini of 0.41.

China’s is 0.38 and India’s is 0.35. Russia’s is similarly relatively low at 0.37. Brazil, like South Africa, has a much higher level of inequality at 0.53.

In South Africa, the evidence suggests that income inequality has risen in the post-apartheid period, though it has fluctuated.

What is clear is that levels of inequality are not decreasing.

What’s driving the trend?

There are a number of drivers.

First, the fact that large numbers of South Africans are unemployed and report no or very low incomes. According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, the rate of unemployment in South Africa, in June 2023, was estimated to be 32.6%. But this doesn’t include people who have given up trying to find work. (The internationally accepted definition of unemployment requires people who are classified as unemployed to be searching for work.) If we include these discouraged workers, the unemployment rate increases to 44.1%.

There are about 40.7 million people in South Africa between the ages of 15 and 64 – this is the group that could potentially work. Those who are not able to work, because they’re at school, or ill, or for some other reason, are estimated to number 13.2 million. That leaves 27.5 million people. Of these, only 16.4 million are working.

Of the 16.4 million, only 11.3 million are employed in the formal sector, where income tends to be higher.

These figures make it clear that the economy is just not able to generate sufficient numbers of employment opportunities.

The second driver is that, among those who are employed, many earn very low wages. Of those who do have work, about 3 million people subsist in the informal economy, where incomes are very low. Another 900,000 people work in agriculture and about 1 million as domestic workers, where incomes are very low.

Even in the formal sector, wages, especially for non-unionised workers, tend to be extremely low.

And third, the incomes at the top end of the income distribution are very high. It’s more difficult to provide reliable statistics on this, because incomes for rich households tend to come from a variety of sources. One way to get a sense of this is to look at household expenditure – a good proxy for incomes. Unfortunately, South Africa’s income and expenditure survey is now quite dated. But what’s available shows that the richest 10% of South African households are responsible for some 52% of all expenditure. The poorest 10% of households contribute only 0.8% of all expenditure.

Is South Africa an outlier?

Yes. However, there are probably many countries that have higher levels of inequality – we just don’t have the data for them. So, while people often say South Africa has the highest Gini in the world, it would be more accurate to say that South Africa has the highest Gini among countries that have data on income inequality.

South Africa’s data is generally very good, reliable and independent.

What steps have been taken? Why didn’t they work?

The major intervention in post-apartheid South Africa was to address inequality in terms of race. This is, of course, extremely important. Among other steps, government introduced the Employment Equity Act to address race-based discrimination in employment, and various measures to address ownership by race. There is controversy about some of the measures. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that they have been very successful in changing the patterns of inequality in South Africa.

However, not enough has been done – race-based inequality is still a real problem. In general, high income South African households, irrespective of race, have done well over the last three decades, which is why inequality has remained stubbornly high.

What steps should be taken now?

I don’t think there is any one policy that would address the issue. Some focus on the labour market and argue that employment is not growing because of labour protections. But I think this is incorrect and does not deal with the nuance of the country’s political and economic situation.

I think we should rather be thinking about how to direct the benefits of economic growth and redistribution policies to benefit those at the bottom end. This could involve, for example, raising incomes at the bottom, creating new opportunities and employment for those who don’t have them, and ensuring that the benefits of growth do not disproportionately benefit those at the top end of the income distribution.

What is the difference between income inequality and wealth inequality?

Income inequality measures only a portion of the real inequality in South Africa. Measuring inequality in wealth gives a more complete picture of how unequal a society is. Income is only one factor that determines wealth. Wealth also includes inheritance, earnings from assets and so on.

The broad picture is that in South Africa wealth inequality is much worse than income inequality. Some striking statistics are that the top 0.01% of people – just 3,500 individuals – own about 15% of all of the wealth in South Africa. The top 0.1% own 25% of the wealth. The net wealth of the top 1% is R17.8 million (about US$944,000). In contrast, the bottom 50% have a negative wealth position (they have more liabilities than they do assets) of R16,000 (around US$850).

This article is part of a media partnership between Wits University’s Southern Centre for Inequality Studies and The Conversation Africa for the Annual Inequality Lecture which will be given by Professor Branko Milanovic, titled “Recent changes in the global income distribution and their political implications”. You can register for the event here.

Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.