If you read the Semafor news website and subscribe to its wonderful Africa newsletter, you likely read this bit on Tuesday: “Anyone who pays attention to global development goals or Africa specifically would, at some stage, have come across the statistic that more than 600 million Africans do not have access to power.
“One of the reasons that number seems to have been unchanged for some while now is that a lot of work is being done to expand access and increasingly by non-traditional grid buildouts. The ‘World Energy Outlook 2023’ report points to the number stabilising this year.”
The report expects Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Ghana and Senegal to reach or get very close to their targets of universal access. But it predicts the number of those without electricity access will continue to rise in many other African countries.
One way to overcome that challenge is, while utility debts and supply chain constraints have slowed investment in grid electricity access, solar home systems sales rose to record levels last year and contributed to half of the increase of people with access in Sub-Saharan Africa then, it says.
Some of the data on solar panel imports in Africa are mind-boggling. Plagued by chronic power outages, South Africa saw the largest surge in imports from any country outside Europe in the first six months this year. It imported 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels, an increase of 438 per cent from the same period last year.
A lot of that went into essentially decentralising what had been one of Africa’s most extensive electricity infrastructure until the corruption and incompetence of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) caught up with it.
Missing from the discussion of Africa’s power poverty, however, is the examination of what happens if the provision of power to the hundreds of people who aren’t connected to the national grid comes from individual home solar installations or microgrids that supply only a few homes. Will we have commensurate decentralised and individualised politics? Will countries like Kenya, which are closer to universal access, escape the worst of it?
It used to be that centrally provided goods—such as education, health, immunisation, education and the state broadcasting monopoly in news and entertainment programmes—were also a platform for organising a collective national experience. They provided points of commonality. They built the nation.
The economic, social and political crises many African nations endured between the start of the 1970s and the end of the ’90s left many of these services in tatters. The revival of the past 30 years has been driven by privatisation and, in some countries, extreme economic liberalisation. We now have a record number of students going to private schools and those with money trooping to private hospitals and clinics.
Outside of about six African countries, the state broadcaster is a pale shadow of itself. The election commissioner of an African country once spoke of the shock of organising his first election.
He was an old nationalist, so wasn’t tuned into how much the times had changed. There was virtually zero response to the commission’s extensive media programme urging people to register to vote. He travelled around the country, and everywhere people were telling him they hadn’t heard of the company.
By some chance, at one of the meetings, one of the people asked him: “By the way, on which radio are you running the campaigns?” He said they were running on state radio. “Ah, that is the problem,” the crowd replied in near-unison, “nobody listens to government radio anymore.” He went back and bought advertising on several private FM stations. Voter registration shot through the roof.
In a time when there are more than 100 private radio stations to choose from, a dozen independent TV stations, without a pervasive public school system and the absence of a state religion, utility services like water and electricity are homogenising national experiences. Being in the same power blackout, and being all ripped on your bills in the same way, brings you together against a common enemy. Now even that is threatened.
The failure of the state to provide power to all, therefore, could potentially be another source of national fracture in our increasingly decentralised economies and social services markets.
Somalia is an interesting example of what an uber-decentralised utility market looks like. Even in the worst years of its civil war, Mogadishu, and other cities and towns, still had some electricity (including street lights) and water. I remember spending some days in still extremely troubled Mogadishu in 2012 and the power supply was stabler than in Nairobi then.
They are a hardy and enterprising lot, Somalis. All of the water and power was provided by a network of small individual suppliers who were generating it in their backyards or at the edge of their villages and towns. The issue then was whether Somalia’s entrenched and divisive clan system made that possible or accounted for the collapse of the state and national grid.
- Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
