There is an immutable law of bureaucratic physics that every civilization eventually learns at great expense: if you task the state with running the Sahara, you will have a shortage of sand within five years. In South Africa, the governing African National Congress has chosen to demonstrate this principle with water and electricity instead. The results are precisely what Friedrich Hayek would have predicted, assuming he had been forced to read by candlelight while waiting for a municipal water truck that never arrived.
Voters in South Africa head to the polls this week for local elections, and by all accounts, they intend to treat their longtime ruling party the way a sensible family treats an embarrassing uncle who has crashed the station wagon, raided the liquor cabinet, and now demands praise for his driving skills. Polls suggest the ANC could scrape together less than a third of the vote, down from an already bruised 45.6 percent in the previous municipal contests. For a party that once held the moral and political hegemony of the nation, it is a stunning collapse. It turns out that revolutionary mythology makes for terrible generator fuel.
The grievances driving this revolt are not abstract ideological disputes. They are painfully, relentlessly physical. Across the country, taps run dry for days because municipal water boards have neglected routine maintenance in favor of expanding their administrative payrolls. Rolling blackouts have become a permanent fixture of daily life as the state-owned power monopoly, Eskom, stumbles from one engineered crisis to another. Roads resemble archaeological excavation sites, and sewage infrastructure routinely gives up the ghost. When citizens turn on the switch and nothing happens, and then turn the faucet and hear only a dry hiss, the state’s grandiose promises of collective deliverance begin to sound less like a program of social justice and more like a cruel joke.
In "The Fatal Conceit," Hayek observed that the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. The South African state imagined it could design and direct the entire metabolic life of an industrial economy. It insisted on maintaining a suffocating grip on electricity generation, water distribution, and transportation, guarding these monopolies with thickets of protective regulation and cadre deployment. The result was not a well-ordered paradise of public service, but a vast institutional parasite that slowly drained the host until the lights literally went out.
What statists never seem to comprehend is that monopolies do not improve simply because you label them public. A private monopoly is a nuisance, but a public monopoly is an armed fortress of incompetence. It faces no genuine price signals, suffers no competitive discipline, and can always demand a larger budget to fix the disasters created by its previous budget. When Eskom fails, South Africans cannot simply switch to a competing provider; until very recently, the state made it agonizingly difficult for private citizens and businesses to even generate their own solar power and feed it into the grid. The official policy was, in essence, that it was better for citizens to sit in the dark under public ownership than to have power provided by an unapproved private contract.
Inevitably, ordinary people have begun to vote with their wallets long before reaching the ballot box. Anyone with modest means has taken steps to secede from the state's crumbling networks. Rooftops are covered in photovoltaic panels, backyards hum with diesel generators, and private boreholes bypass the desiccated municipal mains. Gated neighborhoods hire private security firms because the police cannot be bothered to answer the phone, and private couriers handle logistics because the postal service is an inert museum of red tape. The modern South African middle class has achieved a grudging, expensive form of functional anarchy, paying taxes purely as tribute to a state that functions merely as a toll collector on the road to decay.
The political reckoning now facing the ANC should serve as a cautionary tale for interventionists everywhere who believe that essential services are too important to be left to the free market. When you declare that a resource is too vital to be subject to competition and profit, you ensure that it will eventually be run by civil servants whose chief talent is surviving interdepartmental turf wars. The ballot box may deliver a stinging reprimand this week, but changing the politicians who sit atop a monopolistic apparatus does not fix the machine. Until South Africa dismantles the regulatory fortresses and lets the market deliver the power and water the state has so spectacularly failed to provide, the taps will remain dry, regardless of who occupies the mayor’s office.