Long snaking queues in the baking sun formed around Eskom offices and service centres in many black working-class areas. Many people arrived at the offices the previous night sleeping over to avoid the stampede, including the elderly, frail and sick. A man died in Orlando Community Hall. He was 59-year-old Joseph Fikile Busakwe, he was number 486 in the queue. Like all the other people standing in line, he had gone in a panic to make sure that his electricity was not cut off on 24 November and to avoid having to pay R12 000 for a new pre-paid electricity meter.

Eskom, City Power, SALGA and the Minister of Electricity and Energy, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, panicked people into rushing to ‘upgrade’ their prepaid meters from Key Revision Number One (KRN1) to KRN2 saying that if this was not done by the deadline it would become impossible for consumers to buy electricity. Apparently, the authorities had known about the need to upgrade the meters several years before but, as Ramokgopa admitted, had failed to communicate the message effectively including not telling people that it was not an absolute necessity to physically go to the offices to carry out the exercise.

The minister’s clarifications were too late for the family and friends of the late Busakwe. A life could have been saved. This raises the question of why someone had to die, why was it so important to change from one set of coding numbers of the meters to another?

The driving force is arguably the neoliberal commodification and commercialization of basic services. Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’ prime minister of Britain, captured the essence of neoliberal capitalism when, attacking welfare state benefits, she notoriously accused poor people of “casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Under the past 30 years of ANC rule, South Africa has seen the rapid commodification of services such as water, electricity, housing, healthcare, education, transport, etc. Instead of the state taking responsibility for the provision of these services, this task is handed over to the private sector and people are  increasingly left to fend for themselves including the poorest of the poor. The state shirks its responsibility to those who suffered under colonialism and racial capitalism abandoning them to the vicissitudes of neoliberal existence in the post-apartheid democratic order.

The historical injustices of ‘energy racism’ are forgotten by ANC elites in their embrace of capitalist markets and the privatization of electricity provision. Under apartheid, black areas were called ‘dark cities’ because only white areas were electrified but the coal that fired Eskom’s power plants was dug out by black miners. It was black workers who laid out the giant electricity pylons that crisscross the country but would go home to use braziers, primus stoves and candles to light, cook and warm themselves in their dingy homes. Many paid a price of using dirty energy sources falling sick and dying due to fire accidents and inhaling dangerous fumes. Women suffered the most due to the patriarchal division of labour that condemned them to fetch firewood, cook in smoke-filled spaces and manage energy use inside the household.

The prepaid electricity meter is a device that symbolizes the commodification and privatization of electricity. It makes profit-making the primary goal in the provision of energy. It enforces payment for electricity while denying the working class and the poor any recourse to state assistance when they find electricity unaffordable. The struggle against electricity cutoffs for non-payment is completely evaded because with the prepaid meter those without money privately and quietly disconnect themselves. Like Pontius Pilate, the elite can wash their hands of the plight of the poor who suffer the hardships and indignities of energy deprivation caused by poverty, unemployment and inequality.

The crucial ‘upgrading’ of the meters from KRN1 to KRN2 is mainly aimed at ensuring that the numerical coding and encryption inscribed on prepaid tokens cannot be deciphered, copied or otherwise defrauded by unauthorized ‘ghost’ token vendors. The latter often charge economically stressed electricity users less than the exorbitant, ever-increasing and unaffordable official electricity tariffs. The Standard Transfer Specification Association is the body that governs prepaid metering, it consists of companies that manufacture and use prepaid meter technologies. This is the body that wants the coding of meters to be upgraded the better to safeguard its interests.

What about the interests of the working class and the poor, those who were oppressed and exploited under apartheid, and those who suffer the continuities of past injustices? The energy authorities adopted a top-down, hostile and threatening attitude to this constituency, hence the panic, chaos and trauma caused by what the Minister of Electricity and Energy called an unavoidable ‘technical imperative’. He insisted that there could be ‘no extensions’ despite the palpable suffering caused by the chaos of the poorly planned recoding of the meters. It took the death of Busakwe and the outrage it engendered to reveal that extensions were possible and could be granted by a mere change in the programming of the meter software.

The chaos of the recoding of prepaid meters happened under the watch of the Government of National Unity (GNU). It would be naïve to expect the GNU, led by a pro-capitalist ANC and consisting of political parties that embrace neoliberal racial capitalism, to put people before profit. The truth is that the recoding of meters is part of the array of tools  used by the capitalist class to promote and protect its interests at the expense of the masses. The goals of the victorious struggle for national liberation and economic emancipation are yet to be fully accomplished. We demand clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy for all, not for the few.

Dr. Trevor Ngwane is a Sociology senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.