Humanity, in its infinite capacity for self-delusion, once believed that the discovery of electricity would usher in a golden age of leisure. We envisioned robots doing our laundry while we reclined in the neon glow of progress. Instead, we have reached the terminal stage of the industrial experiment: a world where the poor are forced to choose between the calories required to sustain their biological frames and the voltage required to illuminate their misery. Nowhere is this tragicomedy playing out with more exquisite cruelty than in South Africa, a nation that transitioned from the darkness of institutionalized racism to the literal darkness of a collapsing power grid.

The latest reports from the southern tip of the continent suggest that electricity is no longer a utility; it has become a predatory organism, a high-voltage parasite that is currently eating the food off the plates of the working class. In a display of mathematical gymnastics that would make a subprime mortgage lender weep with envy, the minimum wage in South Africa has been officially decoupled from the reality of human survival. When your prepaid electricity meter has a more voracious appetite than your children, you have officially entered the Buck Valor zone of civilizational collapse.

Let’s look at the players in this theater of the absurd. On one side, we have the African National Congress (ANC), a revolutionary movement that successfully defeated apartheid only to be defeated by the concept of routine maintenance. They’ve spent decades treating the state power utility, Eskom, like a personal piggy bank, proving that while they may have been excellent at liberating a country, they are spectacularly inept at keeping the lights on. It takes a special kind of genius to inherit a functioning—albeit exclusionary—infrastructure and transform it into a series of expensive, decorative pylons. They wrap themselves in the rhetoric of the Left, chanting about the 'masses' while those same masses sit in the dark, wondering if they can fry an egg on a sense of historical grievance.

On the other side, we have the 'market-oriented' vultures who insist that the solution is simply more 'efficiency' and 'privatization.' This is the standard Right-wing solution for a sinking ship: sell the lifeboats to the highest bidder and then charge the drowning people a subscription fee for the air they’re gasping. They want to turn the basic necessity of light into a luxury good, a boutique experience for the few who can afford to bypass the state’s incompetence. The result is a society where the 'Rainbow Nation' has been replaced by a grayscale reality of prepaid vouchers and empty stomachs.

The mechanics of this nightmare are refreshingly simple. For a household surviving on a minimum wage that is more of a suggestion than a living, the hierarchy of needs has been inverted. First, you pay for transport, because in the sprawling geography of post-apartheid urban planning, the poor must travel hours just to reach the jobs that don't pay them enough to live. Second, you pay for electricity, because without it, you are effectively erased from the modern world. You cannot charge the phone you need for work, you cannot see the walls of your own poverty, and you cannot cook the food you can no longer afford to buy. Food, the most basic requirement for carbon-based life forms, has been relegated to third place. It is the 'discretionary spending' of the destitute.

There is a profound, acid-drenched irony in the fact that these households are prioritizing 'prepaid' electricity. The meter is a silent, digital deity that demands constant sacrifice. If you do not feed the meter, the meter kills your connection to the 21st century. So, you feed it. You give it the money that should have gone toward protein, toward vegetables, toward the basic dignity of a full stomach. You sit in a brightly lit room with a hollow chest, staring at a refrigerator that is running perfectly but contains nothing but a jar of expired mustard and hope. It is the ultimate capitalist victory: the machine is powered, even if the operator is starving.

This is the future toward which we are all hurtling, a world where the 'cost of living' is actually just the cost of keeping the systems of our own extraction running. South Africa is just ahead of the curve. While the rest of the world bickers over pronouns or tax brackets for billionaires, a significant portion of the human race is currently engaged in a desperate negotiation with a circuit breaker. We have built a civilization so complex and so fragile that we have forgotten that you cannot eat volts. You cannot sauté a kilowatt-hour.

But don't worry, I’m sure another government committee will be formed, another 'task force' will be appointed, and another round of performative outrage will be broadcast on the very screens that the poor are currently starving themselves to keep powered. It’s a closed loop of stupidity. The Left will blame 'legacy' issues until the sun burns out, and the Right will blame 'corruption' while trying to figure out how to profit from the blackouts. And the people? They’ll keep punching numbers into those little plastic keypads, buying another hour of light so they can clearly see the empty plate in front of them. It’s enough to make you wish for the dark.