President Jacob Zuma claims that 34 percent of households had access to electricity in 1994. Available data, some of it from his own office, suggests he is wrong. By 1994 it was about 50 percent.
As the lights flicker on and off in South Africa, government has come under increasing pressure to resolve and account for the “electricity crisis”.
Earlier this year, Zuma claimed that: “The energy problem is not our problem today. It is a problem of apartheid which we are resolving.”
In a parliamentary question, leader of the EFF, Julius Malema, asked: “What exactly does (Zuma) mean when he says the electricity crisis is caused by apartheid?”
In his response, Zuma claimed: “In 1994, only 34 percent of South Africans had access to electricity.”
Given that, according to South Africa’s latest official statistics, more than 85 percent of households were connected to mains electricity in 2013, it was greater demand that helped explain the pressure on the system, he implied.
Is Zuma correct? What does the data say? Where does the 34 percent figure come from?
The question of how many households had access to electricity in 1994 is clearly a confusing one, as President Zuma quoted a figure of 50 percent when delivering a speech on Freedom Day in 2014, contradicting his latest assertion.
Africa Check tried to contact the presidency about the source of the claim, but despite sending numerous requests to acting spokesman Harold Maloka, no response was received.
The Presidency’s Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation’s development indicators state that access to electricity in 1994/95 stood at 50.9 percent, not Zuma’s claim of 34 percent.
Hassen Mohamed, head of local government performance assessment in the Presidency, told Africa Check the department’s estimate of 50.9 percent was extrapolated from Stats SA data on access to electricity after 1994, and a University of Cape Town study where the figure of 35 percent was given for 1990.
From the document provided, however, it was not possible to work out where that number originated.
The Department of Energy says 34 percent, but has given different figures.
Next Africa Check went to the Department of Energy. Pinning down firm data on access to electricity in 1994 is harder than you would think. And it is not just Zuma who is confused.
In 2012, then minister of energy Dipuo Peters claimed that 30 percent of households had access to electricity in 1994. In 2013, she claimed that the figure was 36 percent. And a page on the department’s website claims that: “Access to electricity in 1994 was at 34 percent”.
The department’s spokesman, Johannes Mokobane, was asked for a source for the numbers.
Queries were sent to Khorommbi Bongwe, the line manager for the Integrated National Electrification Programme.
He told Africa Check that “according to Stats SA, access to electricity was sitting at 34 percent … Even the presidency is aware that we were actually sitting at 34 percent in 1994”.
Stats SA says official stats do not support the claim.
However, Stats SA’s manager of service delivery statistics, Niël Roux, told Africa Check that he was not aware of any Stats SA data that supported the claim.
Roux said the earliest data the organisation had was from the 1995 October Household Survey, which found that 63.5 percent of households used electricity for lighting. But he said the data wasn’t used often today because the survey was “hamstrung by a series of methodological and practical issues”.
Before 1994 there was very little national data on access to basic services in South Africa.
In late 1993 and early 1994, the Southern Africa Labour Development Research Unit undertook a national survey to determine the conditions under which South Africans were living. It found that 53.6 percent of households had access to electricity
Professor Ingrid Woolard, a University of Cape Town economics professor whose research interests include survey methodology, said the survey was “fairly reliable, but it was a small survey – less than 9 000 households – so there will be some margin of error”.
Stats SA’s Roux said the Stats SA’s “earliest credible data source was probably the 1996 Census” which found that 58.2 percent of households in South Africa had access to electricity that year.
University of Cape Town professor Anton Eberhard, who has written extensively about electricity provision and infrastructure in South Africa, told Africa Check the claimed figure probably applied to 1990 or 1991.
“I suspect the 34 percent number refers to a date earlier than 1994, probably 1991 when the electrification drive commenced,” he said.
Professor Harald Winkler, director of the energy research centre, agreed: “I would have thought 34 percent might have been 1990, rather than 1994.”
Africa Check was unable to find any credible research or data for access to electricity between 1990 and 1992.
Conclusion: access to electricity in 1994 was probably about 50 percent.
Zuma claims that 34 percent of South Africans had access to electricity in 1994. Despite numerous attempts to confirm the source of his claim we did not hear back from his office.
The available data suggests that the claim was wrong.
A national study conducted over 1993 and 1994 estimated that access stood at 53.6 percent and the national census in 1996 found 58.2 percent of households had access that year.
The broader claim about the number of people with access to electricity under apartheid is not wholly wrong.
The experts we spoke with believe that only about 34 percent of households had access in 1990 or 1991 before the long drive began to increase access to electricity.
Such a level of access left the majority of black South Africans without electricity for cooking, heating and lighting.
* This article first appeared on Africa Check (http://www.africacheck.org), a non-profit organisation run from the Journalism Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, which promotes accuracy in public debate, testing claims made by public figures around the continent