On July 16, 2026, the World Bank approved a $1.5 billion loan to modernize South Africa's electricity, freight rail, water, and sanitation systems. It is the fourth rescue of this kind since 2022, which means the first three left the wreck standing. The conditions attached to the money are a list of the ordinary rules Pretoria spent a generation discarding. The government is to build a competitive wholesale electricity market, open transmission to private investment, allow private rail operators to compete for freight, grant the first private concession at a port terminal, and let private firms provide water. Those conditions are the sound of a creditor describing a machine that no longer runs.
Maintenance, competition, professional management, and independent oversight keep a grid from becoming a patronage office. Conservatives who treat institutions as machines have been saying so while Democrats in American cities treat the same institutions as prizes for the faithful. The African National Congress is the party that removed those disciplines. It is also the party now borrowing to put them back. The wrecking crew is sending the invoice abroad.
The claim is not that apartheid was just. In 1994 the ANC inherited an industrial economy that was unjustly distributed and technically sophisticated. The duty that came with that inheritance was to universalize access without destroying the competence that kept the lights on and the ore moving to the sea. The party did the opposite. It converted technical administration into political allocation. In thirty years it consumed capital that had taken generations to assemble. Democrats who now talk the same way about American agencies, as if competence were a colonial residue, are watching a finished experiment and applauding the method.
What sat on the ground in 1994 was a working industrial system. The 1996 transport Green Paper recorded about 44,600 kilometers of rail, with a replacement cost of R101 billion in 1996 rand, seven seaports, and a national transport estate valued at more than R286 billion. In 1995, those ports moved 130.7 million tonnes of cargo, 69.7 million of which were handled through the Richards Bay bulk terminal alone. South African rail accounted for roughly 80% of the continent’s rail infrastructure. That share was steel, sleepers, and signaling on a continent that otherwise ran on trucks and dirt.
Eskom’s Kendal station, completed in 1993, was the largest indirect dry-cooled power plant in the world. The generating fleet was available 80% of the time and still improving. Behind the turbines sat a deep financial sector, commercial institutions that could finance a mine or a mill, and a scarce layer of engineering and administrative skill that the country could not afford to scatter. Ore moved from the interior to the coastal terminals, into smelters and factories, and through a finance system that priced the risk. The pieces locked together. A port that worked made a mine worth keeping. A mine that shipped made a power station worth maintaining.
Picture a vast house that had been run under an immoral rule, with only part of the family allowed to use the rooms. The just work was to open those rooms, extend the plumbing, and add bedrooms, not to hand the maintenance keys to cousins, stop inspecting the roof, sell the copper out of the walls, and declare every leak a triumph over colonialism.
Between 1994 and 1999, Eskom connected 1.75 million homes, finished a year ahead of schedule, and sold what the government itself boasted was the world’s cheapest power. The government put that boast on the record because the plants were still being run by people who treated availability as a duty. By 1999, nearly half of Eskom’s managerial, professional, and supervisory workforce was black, coloured, or Indian. Fleet availability reached 92.7% in 1998. Inclusion and excellence coexisted for a full decade, which is a fact that later excuses need the country to forget. In the late 1990s Eskom’s own engineers warned that shortages would arrive around 2007 if the country stopped building plant and stopped maintaining what it already had. The warning proved accurate almost to the year.
The party had already chosen a different priority. At its 1997 conference, the ANC adopted a deployment strategy. In December 1998 the National Executive Committee created a National Deployment Committee. The 1999 strategy instructed cadres to identify key centers of power and to place loyalists so that the “leadership, values and culture” of every state institution would change. The Youth League spoke of hegemony over legislatures, boards, parastatals, and NGOs. Cadre deployment, when stated in English rather than in party dialect, refers to the ruling party placing loyalists in charge of power plants and ports.
An engineer inside that system serves two masters. One master is the boiler, the voltage, the load. The other is the committee that handed him the job. Procurement becomes political currency, a way to pay friends and punish holdouts. Maintenance produces no ribbon and no cousin’s contract, so it is the least rewarding work in the building. Engineers who insist on specifications are managed out, and the people who replace them learn the lesson. The party made a transformer that needed a part into a faction that needed a contract.
The state’s own commission later found the wreckage. The Zondo Commission documented about R57 billion in tainted spending, more than 97% of it running through Eskom and Transnet. The Gupta network extracted at least R15 billion. A former minister of public enterprises put the broader damage as high as R500 billion. President Cyril Ramaphosa accepted the finding in language his own party can no longer walk back. “The appointment and removal of board members and senior executives in state-owned enterprises was one of the key causes of state capture.” He was naming cadre deployment by its working title.
In 2022 load shedding averaged eight hours a day and shaved 2% to 3% off GDP growth. Households cooked on the hours the party left them, factories idled on the hours it took back, and a country that had sold the cheapest power in the world sat in the dark on a schedule. Eskom’s fleet availability, 92.7% in 1998, fell to 55% in 2023. Freight rail hauled 149 million tonnes in 2022/23. Transnet met 5 of 18 key performance indicators and leaned on R196.3 billion in government guarantees. A court set aside an R8 billion contract for 233 locomotives. Parliament was told it would take R220 billion to R240 billion to restore pre-COVID logistics. In 2024, four South African ports ranked among the worst in the world, with Durban at the bottom of the list.
The 2025 Green Drop report found that 47% of 848 municipal wastewater systems were in a critical state, and 47.3% of treated water vanished before anyone could bill for it. Only 15% of municipalities produced a clean audit last year. Irregular expenditure reached R40.14 billion. Growth averaged 0.7% for a decade. Real GDP per capita sits below its 2007 level. Unemployment has averaged 32.4%. Those figures are what a loyalty-first staffing system leaves on the ground after the speeches end.
Adam Smith wrote that great nations are never impoverished by private prodigality, but that they are sometimes impoverished by public prodigality and misconduct. The wealthy bought generators, solar panels, boreholes, and private security, and a good many of them left. Poor black South Africans remained trapped in the dark, the queues, and the towns the party claimed to have liberated. What the ANC billed as decolonization consumed the foundational capital, and the next generation holds the replacement cost.
Then Eskom posted 441 consecutive days without load shedding after a recovery plan that put maintenance, accountability, and operating discipline back on the floor, the same practices cadre deployment had spent a generation treating as obstacles to party control, and the salvage crew did not invent a new ideology, they inspected boilers, enforced shift reports, and fired the managers who treated a power station as a patronage office. That run of days is the proof that the earlier collapse was a staffing choice. The plants could still work when the party stopped using them as a jobs program.
The Democratic Socialists of America now supply the governing energy of New York City government and a growing bloc in Minnesota. They want public groceries, public takeovers, and ideological reliability in appointments. They treat city agencies as centers of power to capture, the same conversion the ANC performed on Eskom and Transnet. Democrats who cheer this as justice are repeating a staffing error that already blacked out a country. Conservatives who treat a subway, a water utility, and a grid as machines to maintain are the adults in that argument.
Defenders say American institutions are stronger. For now they are. Strength is a practice, and a generation of loyalty-first staffing can unwind it. A subway signal, a water main, and a power transformer do not care who won the party confrence or how noble the slogans sounded in the hall. They respond to inspection, calibration, and replacement schedules. When those schedules are handed to cadres chosen for faction rather than for skill, a city gets the same procurement politics that hollowed out Eskom. There is no reason to expect different physics in Brooklyn or Minneapolis than in Johannesburg.
It takes generations to build a working industrial state. A few decades of neglect will break it. Americans still have the luxury of learning from someone else’s dashboard. They should not purchase the lesson at retail, as South Africa did.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis atvamuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
This is the DSA blueprint with American branding. Public groceries, public takeovers, loyalty-first appointments, ideological staffing, and contempt for competence turn machines into patronage offices. A grid does not care about equity slogans. A port does not move cargo because a committee achieved demographic balance. A water system does not purify sewage because activists denounced colonialism. South Africa proved that inclusion and excellence could coexist until cadre politics ate away at the system. America should learn before New York, Minneapolis, and every captured Democrat city buys the lesson at full price. Whiteness is not the crime. Destroying civilization is.
It's not just the DSA. Back in the 1980s I watched as various municipalities stripped out the requirement that Engineers actually be engineers -- the jobs paid too well to let be and the Right People didn't have any engineer friends.