The South African economy emerged from its festive season hibernation to once again confront level 6 load–shedding. No end is in sight, and the long-term prognosis offers little hope.
There won’t be a single manufacturing business in the entire country that doesn’t have relocating or significantly adapting their operation under discussion. Thousands upon thousands of jobs are at risk.
The ANC national government was warned about this problem over two decades ago, while South Africans had their first exposure to the problem in January 2008, when loadshedding was first formally implemented.
The cause of the crisis is now apparent to all except to the most zealous of ideological extremists. After three decades of political rather than commercial decision making, many more people produce much less electricity, vastly less efficiently.
Absolutely no-one expects the ANC-led government to resolve the issue which they themselves created. The solution will need to come from elsewhere. In this context, it is important to ask how the South African system of government has performed when confronted by a catastrophic failure?
WC knows solution but cannot implement
DA Youth Leader Nicholas Nyati tweeted, “ANC voters are responsible for loadshedding”, but this is only half the truth.
I live in a DA-run municipality, located in a DA-run province, and I don’t have power either.
It is one thing to hold the national electorate responsible for the poor choices it has made. That is the nature of democracy, but what about the provinces who expressly opposed those choices?
On its website the DA has documented its response to the electricity crisis from 2013 up until the present day. It points out that it is 25 years since the DA first made the ANC aware of the crisis. For the last 14 of those years, the DA has had an outright majority in the Western Cape where I live, but it has been impotent in its response to the electricity crisis.
Despite identifying the problem, knowing the solution, and having the full support of the provincial electorate behind it, the DA-run Western Cape Provincial Government has been thus far unable to add a single kW/h of net generating capacity to the grid. Neither has it been able to protect consumers from prices which have increased 653% in 15 years, making them 3.5 times more expensive than they would have been if they had increased in line with inflation.
In fairness to the DA, in many cases this has not been for the lack of trying. The system is simply stacked against them. Only this week, the Western Cape DA, with 55% of the vote, was reduced to marching on the offices of the party which has 29% of the vote, because the real power vests with the latter.
Fighting within the current system, the DA have made some gains and in 2025, 16 years after it gained an outright provincial majority, the DA-led Western Cape Government hopes to add 0.6GW to the grid. It still won’t be enough to end loadshedding in the province, and it will only benefit 6 of the province’s 24 municipalities.
It’s not just electricity
We have all become intimately acquainted with the electricity crisis, because at present for up to ten hours a day we cannot turn on a light or boil a kettle, and an app on our phone can tell us exactly when our government will next be failing us.
But this same crisis of government also exists in our economy, policing, transport, health, education and virtually everything else the national government touches. It is just harder to observe until you personally need to call upon those services.
Just as it has with electricity, the Western Cape Provincial Government has highlighted devastating failures in economic policy, employment legislation, policing, rail, spatial planning and land management, the health system and more.
In each case it has proposed solutions and has the explicit support of the Western Cape electorate, and in each case, it has been unable to implement its plans.
If our system of government ends up actively preventing solutions, and in doing so, denies provincial voters their democratic will whilst protecting corrupt and incompetent officials at a national level, then it is fatally flawed and must be changed.
We often refer to South Africa as a ‘Unitary State’ precisely because the central national government holds virtually all power, but South Africa is more correctly a ‘Quasi-Federal’ state.
Administratively our country has a federal structure offering the allure of decentralised power, but it is then curtailed by a Constitution that squeezes the life out of substantive federalism and makes it all but impossible to muster the national parliamentary super-majority and support of six provinces necessary to disempower the national government, no matter how incompetent and corrupt it may be.
Self-determination is the solution
But, for the Western Cape and any other province which chooses to reject ANC rule, there is a solution.
The right to self-determination is the key to amending the South African system of government, delivering increased decentralisation, and ultimately improving the lives of those who don’t vote for corrupt and incompetent parties like the ANC.
The authors of the Constitution segmented South Africa into nine geographical regions, granting each its own parliament and provincial government. Since it was primarily negotiated by the ANC and the National Party, both of whom favoured a strong central government and limited (real) regional autonomy, the Constitutional authors then stripped the provinces of any real power.
What they could not have known was how international law would develop over the subsequent three decades. The right of self-determination, which the South African government had repeatedly sworn to uphold when it was largely considered a means by which to end colonisation, was progressively extended by international precedent to include many other groups of people, including those with a ‘territorial connection’ and an ‘ideological affinity’ based on their democratic will.
All of the levers required to exercise self-determination on this basis had inadvertently been written into the South African Constitution. Each province could write its own Constitution defining who were its ‘people’, provincial premiers could unilaterally call referendums to establish how those people wanted to be governed, the authority of international law was expressly recognised by the Constitution, and the deliberate misinterpretation of international law was prohibited.
Opposition parties must not waste their energies on futile wars of words with an ANC who will never change. Where they govern, they must assert their right to self-determination in their regional parliaments and consult with their constituents on how provincial voters wish to see it exercised, including by means of a referendum where appropriate.
A Western Cape Peoples Bill
In the Western Cape, the Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG) is lobbying political parties to pass a ‘Western Cape Peoples Bill’ in the provincial parliament which will formally claim the right to self-determination for the province.
Once claimed, South Africa is obliged to grant self-determination which the UN says can be exercised in the form of increased autonomy (devolution), federalism, independence, or unification.
The overwhelming majority of parties in the current Western Cape Parliament support federalism. If the ‘Peoples Bill’ were to be followed up by a ‘Western Cape Federal Autonomy Bill’ in the national assembly, it would potentially allow the province to assert provincial control over electricity, policing, rail, and taxation. It could exempt the Western Cape from race-based policy, and give the Western Cape a veto over any changes to the South African Constitution which would affect the province.
For secessionists, the constitutional door will also have been opened.
In 2024, there is a very real prospect that Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal may also find themselves being governed by a national government they expressly rejected. They will be observing developments in the Western Cape with great interest.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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