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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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So there’s corrupt, banal and incompetent, reasonable but unpopular, and crazy and evil as the three basic blocs.

It sounds like the ANC can caucus with the EFF/MK if they have to; can they caucus with the DA and friends?

And regarding cape independence, I’d be interested in hearing from people with specific knowledge- how much of it is just people with whatever agenda hitching it to complaints about poor national level governance? Texas nationalism is basically that- people with some not-gonna-happen agenda(goldbugs, Russophiles, etc) convince themselves that Texas independence would be their best shot at implementing their agenda, and generate interest off of the fact that everyone in Texas except partisan democrats thinks the state can govern itself better than the feds can. In South Africa’s case one can easily see the same process going on.

It sounds like the ANC can caucus with the EFF/MK if they have to; can they caucus with the DA and friends?

Probably? I don't have too extensive of a sense of how any of the three coalitions would play out—how much each would have to concede, compared to what they're willing, or how much they'd demand.

Looking at the 2021 municipal results, wikipedia lists several coalitions including both DA/EFF and ANC/EFF coalitions, but no ANC/DA ones. I'm not sure how much predictive power that has, though.

I’d be interested in hearing from people with specific knowledge- how much of it is just people with whatever agenda hitching it to complaints about poor national level governance?

My impression is not really? The Referendum party is basically campaigning on "we'll work with the DA completely and entirely, we just want to force a referendum."

That said, I don't know how well independence would work. I'm sure it has some level of dependence on other parts of the country for things, and don't know what Cape Town's economy does mostly and whether that's separable.

(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)

To be clear, I really don't think independence is likely, though a referendum is possible.

(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)

This seems beyond belief. This USG page makes the claim, but this article deboonks it. IEA statistics back up the deboonking, putting South African generation at 27% of all Africa's generation.

That seems somewhat more plausible, although it's interesting to note that in PPP terms South Africa generates only 1/8 of Africa's GDP.

It looks like past production used to be higher from Eskom, and lower for the rest of Africa, but you're still right that that seems not to have been true.

The site cited by wikipedia puts Eskom at 230 terawatt hours, in 2008. (Eskom's own data puts it at 224 sold, 239 produced.) 2008 also looks to be the peak year of Eskom's power generation.

If Eskom were 45% of Africa's power, going with the more generous 239 figure, then Africa would be producing 531 terawatt hours. But your statistics site puts it at 625 gigawatt hours, meaning that Eskom was only 38%.

I haven't found what the source is for Africa's electricity production is yet.