South Africa’s continuing Jewish exodus is powered by more than the energy crisis

Loadshedding has scarred the national psyche but the roots of Jewish emigration are deeper, encompassing economic, personal and political motivations.

South Africans have endured two to eight hours a day of loadshedding for more than a decade. Loadshedding is rotating power outages, or rolling blackouts, that relieve the stress on the national power grid that is caused by insufficient generation capacity.

The national energy crisis, which escalated in severity from 2008, has been attributed to aging infrastructure which has not been maintained over the years. It has, however, stabilised in the past few months at between two and eight hours a day. While there is a national effort to deal with this issue, encouraging solar and wind-generated power, loadshedding has had a psychological impact on the country.

The South African Jewish community complains about it, but has loadshedding actually pushed some in the community to emigrate?

“The Jewish community has been leaving South Africa for the last 63 years, and mostly this has nothing to do with loadshedding or any specific economic issues in South Africa,” says businessman Howard Sackstein.

 Jewish emigration, he says, started after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when people left because they were afraid for their future. This continued with the Soweto Uprising in 1976, when people left for the same reason. Emigration culminated in 1994, when people fearful of democracy left before the country’s first democratic elections. And this fear continues.

Sackstein says that while the country is substantially better off than it was 30 years ago when it was run by a racist dictatorship, “it is nowhere near as good as it should have been. It has fallen behind in development in comparison to countries such as Botswana, Kenya and Rwanda. It has been plagued by corruption, maladministration, and government incompetence”.