There is a distinct, exhausting genre of tragedy that belongs entirely to the public sector: the slow-motion collapse of things that ordinary commerce solved over a century ago. As South Africans file into voting booths for local elections, clutching grievances over dry taps and uncollected refuse, the ruling African National Congress appears genuinely wounded that anyone would hold them accountable for basic mechanical reality. The state behaves precisely like that embarrassing uncle who shows up uninvited to Thanksgiving, loudly announces he is a master plumber, dismantles your downstairs bathroom pipes, and then expects a standing ovation because he left a half-empty bucket under the leak.
The voters, predictably, have had enough of the bucket. From sprawling townships to leafy suburbs, the complaints filed with foreign correspondents and local pollsters are not about grand geopolitical treatises. They are about raw sewage bubbling up through suburban asphalt, streetlights that serve solely as perches for pigeons, and the ever-present hum of diesel generators keeping groceries cold. Decades of central planning and unyielding faith in state-owned enterprise have brought an economy that ought to be the industrial crown jewel of the continent to its knees.
Friedrich Hayek warned us with surgical precision in The Fatal Conceit: the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Nowhere is that fatal conceit more physically manifest than in South Africa’s power grid. For decades, the electricity monopoly Eskom was treated not as a utility company that needs to balance its ledger and maintain its turbines, but as a patronage machine, a political football, and a sacred altar to state control. The result is the bureaucratic euphemism of the century: "load shedding." When the state claims an exclusive franchise on a service and then systematically cuts it off for eight hours a day, it is not managing resources; it is confessing to utter bankruptcy of purpose.
What makes the local elections so poignant is that local government is where the romantic myths of state benevolence go to die. You cannot give an impassioned speech about liberation to an unpaved road that has just swallowed a commuter’s suspension. You cannot nationalize away the arithmetic of a leaking municipal water board that loses over a third of its treated water before it ever reaches a kitchen sink. The ANC’s insistence on "cadre deployment"—the quaint practice of placing party loyalists atop complex engineering and logistical apparatuses—has borne its inevitable, predictable fruit. Merit surrendered to political pedigree, and the infrastructure simply rusted out underneath the party's feet.
Yet, amid the gloom, the human instinct for commerce and self-preservation has provided the only genuine light. In true testament to spontaneous order, South Africans have spent the past several years aggressively privatizing their own lives just to survive the bureaucracy. Neighborhoods band together to hire private security companies that outnumber the actual police force. Private solar panels are slapped onto rooftops at a blistering pace, creating a decentralized energy revolution despite the regulatory hurdles thrown up by nervous energy ministers. Boreholes are drilled in backyards to bypass the crumbling municipal mains. The people are voting with their wallets for the private sector every single afternoon, long before they cast their paper ballots.
The ruling class, of course, views this exodus into private competence with deep suspicion. To the dedicated apparatchik, an off-grid solar installation is not an innovative solution to an emergency; it is an act of ideological insubordination, depriving the state of tariff revenue it never earned in the first place. For years, the government dragged its heels on allowing private generation, clinging to its monopoly until the very brink of complete grid collapse forced their trembling hands. Regulation was not employed to protect the public from harm, but to protect the state from competition.
As the ballots are tallied, the results will undoubtedly be dissected in terms of tribal loyalty, coalition politics, and historical legacy. But the real lesson is much simpler, and universally applicable from Pretoria to Washington. Whenever a political entity arrogates unto itself the exclusive authority to supply the necessities of human life, it will inevitably deliver shortages, decay, and excuses. South Africa’s citizens are not demanding miracles from their government. They are simply asking the embarrassing relative to finally put down the wrench, admit he does not know how the pipes work, and let the professionals fix the floor.