I have a boring story to tell you. One evening we went to a major shopping centre for coffee. We parked and walked around, deciding where to go. Then the lights went off. Every restaurant closed its doors and we all headed back to our cars, where we sat in a 20-minute traffic jam just to leave the parking lot.
I told you it was a boring story. It’s the kind of story every middle-class South African has heard and experienced a dozen times over the past few years. We’d rather have electricity all the time. We’d rather the lights stayed on. It’s far more fun that way. Especially when it’s raining and we’d rather watch a movie or get a pizza.
It’s also the story that explains why our government has decided to approve a 20-year investment plan that calls for six new nuclear stations while retaining the dominant position of large centralised coal power stations in our national grid.
We need to keep the lights on. No one denies this. But most of the time, what we’re actually doing is talking about the lights on for people who are already wealthy — those who are used to unfettered access to electricity, who have only recently realised the truth of the cliché that we can’t always get what we want.
Forty percent of South Africa’s 48-million people are poor and more than half of poor people are female. About 2,5-million households are still without any access to electricity and four million households do not use electricity for cooking. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, assuming a household of five people, 20-million people still rely on polluting fuels and they are more likely to be female.
This is not a trivial issue. In some areas, such as the small town of Lady Grey in the Eastern Cape, or in the urban settlement of Cato Manor in Durban, up to 90% of households still use paraffin for cooking.
Using fuels such as paraffin, biomass or coal results in serious health impacts. The World Health Organisation estimates that 1 000 people die every year from indoor air pollution in South Africa, 450 of whom are children. This is lower than the South African Medical Research Council estimates, which state that 2 489 people die as a result of indoor air pollution every year. The white paper on renewable energy, released in 2003, calculated that the health impact of household coal pollution is between R202-million and R831-million a year.
High cost
Reliance on paraffin in particular comes at a high cost. In 2003, the treasury estimated the cost of paraffin-related incidents at R104-billion, 50 times more than the annual turnover from paraffin sales.
In addition, women who fetch fuel and water for their families suffer head, neck and back pain, and spend hours at a time on this chore, thus reducing their chances of earning a cash income.
Middle-class people are becoming impatient with the idea of handouts but doing nothing is not an option.
We need to take a step back, however, and consider what the purpose of our national energy policy should be. We are adding more and more capacity and increasing access to electricity but this is not going to help those who cannot afford electricity in the first place.
We tend to frame energy as a purely technocratic issue rather than a question of social justice. And for the same reason we prefer not to engage too deeply with energy policy because that’s the preserve of the experts and ordinary people aren’t qualified to talk about engineering. And, besides, it’s boring.
But energy is intimately connected with the way people live. It is a social issue and it is also a gender issue. We know women earn less than men, spend more time in unpaid work and are more likely to be poor or to live in rural areas. This means they are more likely to lack access to electricity or struggle to afford it. In addition, energy tends to be a female responsibility because cooking — an energy-intensive process — tends to be seen as a woman’s task. When we talk about the health impact of dirty fuel, such as asthma and respiratory disease, this tends to impact on women more, as they breathe in smoke while they cook.
Policy measures
Currently our energy policy is about handouts. We’re giving just enough to people to make us feel good about our social policies but not considering whether there are more appropriate policy measures which could give real improvement to people’s lives giving a hand up.
South Africa has a legal duty according to the Constitution and to several international treaties — not only to consider women’s needs and desires when making policy but also to actively ensure its policy is gender-inclusive. This means that policy must seek to enhance the status of women and eradicate gender inequality.
There are several ways to do this. We need policy that seeks to improve the lives of ordinary people. This could include, for example, properly insulated low-cost housing. Women tend to be responsible for energy purchases, and better insulation would mean less money is spent on heating — thus directly benefiting disposable incomes while reducing indoor pollution. Biogas digesters in rural areas would provide clean energy, protect against deforestation and groundwater contamination, provide natural fertiliser and alleviate the drudgery of fetching firewood.
These two examples are not high-cost or high-technology interventions, and they are also not the only answers.
But to find those answers we first need to have a conversation — a real conversation, as a nation, between politicians, engineers, business, trade unions, media, women, men and you and me — about what we want our energy policy to look like. This conversation may not be welcomed by everyone so we might need to shout before our voices are heard.
We aren’t used to thinking about energy because in the past it has always been available to those with money and status. We need to start thinking about what it’s like when the lights are never on, and what that impact is.
Jocelyn Newmarch is the author of the Earthlife Africa Johannesburg report Second Class Citizens: Gender, Energy and Climate Change in South Africa, which was released last month.