Ron Derby | Our biggest mistake was trusting Eskom. Megawatt Park can't solve this crisis

It’s astonishing to think of just how long the lack of power has been an Achilles' heel for the economy.

For most of us, December 2007 was a watershed moment in South Africa as it marked the beginning of the end of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki and the emergence of his then-deputy, Jacob Zuma, and his brand of politics that would follow. But it was also the month when Eskom quite simply could no longer meet energy demand in the country that in that year grew over 5%.

It’s a high mark in South African growth that we haven’t seen since. The lights literally went out in the economy that month and we’ve been struggling to recover since. A myriad of factors got us to the point in December 2007, including not heeding warnings from Eskom and others about the looming energy crunch. The state was too caught up in the ideological debates of the governing party about the merits of partial or full privatisation to make any decision about just how the country would go about building additional generation capacity.