Meeting South Africa’s household energy needs is not just about having access to the grid, or a suite of renewable technologies on hand. It requires tackling the roots of poverty in one of the most unequal societies in the world, writes Leonie Joubert. South Africa’s university campuses are burning right now, and it’s hard for us to talk about anything else as the country faces one of the biggest crises in its 22 years of democracy. The campuses are burning with ideological and political dissatisfaction, and in some cases this has literarily ended with libraries, buildings, and buses in ashes. The 2016 academic year is drawing to a close, and a small band of students are leveraging the approaching final exams to force the state to take seriously their demands: free higher education, and a syllabus stripped of its Eurocentric self-importance. But underlying this almost inevitable eruption of rage is the fact that the ‘rainbow nation’, with its miracle Mandela-era reconciliation, has not managed to reverse the structural roots of inequality that are the result … Continue reading Energy ‘poverty’ still entrenched in SA