Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Emmanuelle Veuillet, Associate professor, University of Juba

When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, civil servants found themselves at the centre of a deep political and economic crisis.

The state was, and remains, the largest employer, surpassing private companies and NGOs. In 2015, the approved national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel. Over 85% were engaged in security-related functions. Despite the absence of official statistics, observations confirm that the civil service has not shrunk over the years.

As the conflict became increasingly politicised and shaped by ethnic divisions, civil servants had to navigate shifting loyalties and growing insecurity.

The war also triggered an economic collapse. In 2015, the South Sudanese pound lost nearly 90% of its value against the US dollar. Trade routes were disrupted. Domestic production of products declined and shortages of imported goods fuelled hyperinflation.

The near-total collapse of oil exports – the government’s main source of revenue – severely weakened state finances. By late 2015, the government was effectively bankrupt and increasingly unable to fund the public sector.

This resulted in long delays in civil servants’ salary payments from several months to a year. Hyperinflation also eroded the value of wages.

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Read more: Is Sudan’s war the reason for South Sudan’s economic crisis? What’s really going on with oil revenue

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This did not lead to a mass exodus from the civil service, however. During my PhD fieldwork, I found that many civil servants chose to stay. As a political sociologist, I was interested in understanding their decision to remain in a broke administration during such challenging times. I explored the little-known wartime experiences of ordinary middle-ranking civil servants to make sense of it.

Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in South Sudan, I found that civil servants chose to remain in government because – despite the absence of a salary and direct income – their jobs provided benefits. These included social status, and access to networks and opportunities. The job provided a sense of normality, too, during a period of political upheaval. It was also a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

The civil war formally ended with the 2018 peace agreement, but South Sudan remains mired in political and economic crises. My findings help explain why, despite repeated shocks, state institutions have endured.

The study

I collected the data in my study between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Western Equatoria in South Sudan. The region doesn’t have oil resources, hosts a variety of ethnic groups and plunged into war later than many others. I relied on observations from various administration offices at county and state levels, and informal conversations held during these visits.

As part of my research, I followed the stories of six civil servants – two women and four men – from different departments and directorates at the county and state levels. They held different grades within the administration. They were aged over 30 and held at least a high school certificate.

The findings

My study shows that civil servants’ attachment to a state with no money was shaped by material, social and political factors.

Before the war – from independence in 2011 to 2013 – even lower-ranking government jobs provided civil servants with a modest but stable standard of living. For instance, a cleaner (grade 16) in public administration earned around US$180 to US$200 at the time. But after the conflict began, that economic security disappeared.

By April 2017, a director’s monthly salary (grade 3) could only buy a 20kg bag of rice and a 10kg bag of red beans. An administrative officer’s (grade 12) salary could barely pay for 2kg of rice.

All civil servants had to look for other sources of income for daily survival. These included farming, small-scale businesses, and renting or selling properties. The economic security attached to a position in the civil service had vanished.

Yet civil servants continued to go to the office because it still gave them access to other forms of resources, helped them maintain their status and preserved an appearance of normality.

The benefits included:

• access to opportunities, such as NGO trainings and workshops that provided per diems for the period of participation, or a certificate of attendance that could be added to a CV

• the knowledge and power to help people and do favours, which helped them cultivate social networks that could be used to access goods, services or credit

• preserving social position and maintaining practices that reinforced a sense of normality, both in the eyes of others and for themselves

• a shared experience which fostered forms of solidarity and mutual understanding among civil servants. They organised social activities and support mechanisms, such as savings groups, among themselves rather than with other social groups.

A desired future

Despite the South Sudanese government’s withdrawal from many of its social responsibilities, civil servants continued to imagine a different kind of state. Those I interviewed shared a vision of a strong and functioning state.

It was often accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, as they imagined themselves helping to build such a state. Maintaining the functioning of state institutions and preserving some level of public service during the crisis became a meaningful commitment, a survival strategy and an investment in upward mobility within a “wished-for state”.

The decision to remain in this career was also shaped by a lack of alternatives, however. Middle-ranking civil servants had relatively low levels of formal education and lacked the networks needed to secure other employment. The private sector has remained small because of a difficult business climate and a lack of economic diversification.

The total collapse of a functioning state would mean the disappearance of their jobs – which helps explain their efforts to keep the administration going.

The economic crisis in South Sudan raises questions, however, about how long civil servants can continue to sustain state institutions.

In many cases, salaries have gone unpaid for more than a year. And cash shortages in banks prevent civil servants from accessing whatever funds may be available to them.

– Serving a state that couldn’t pay: why South Sudan’s civil servants didn’t quit during the war
– https://theconversation.com/serving-a-state-that-couldnt-pay-why-south-sudans-civil-servants-didnt-quit-during-the-war-286083

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lesedi Senamele Matlala, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Public Policy, Monitoring and Evaluations, University of Johannesburg

Across South Africa, there are various ways for people to report issues like broken infrastructure, unreliable water supply, failing clinics and poor municipal services. The channels include ward meetings, hotlines, and digital platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and X. Complaints are often shared publicly and sometimes gain traction.

But are they enough? As a researcher specialising in governance, public policy and citizen-based monitoring, I recently conducted a study examining whether the system in South Africa is working as it should. The study was prompted by the paradox that despite the expansion of citizen participation mechanisms and digital reporting platforms since 2013, public dissatisfaction with service delivery remains high. This raises questions about whether citizen feedback is influencing government decision-making.

Citizen-based monitoring was introduced by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation in 2013. It was designed to strengthen accountability and improve frontline service delivery by enabling citizens to monitor public services and communicate their experiences directly to government institutions.

My research shows that the central problem behind persistent service delivery failures is not the absence of public participation. South Africans continue to report problems, attend meetings, engage online and raise concerns about service delivery. The deeper problem is the absence of institutional response. Citizen-generated feedback is rarely integrated into formal government systems such as planning, budgeting, performance management, or service delivery processes. This means many complaints are acknowledged but not acted upon.

The study therefore recommends embedding citizen-generated feedback directly into government planning, budgeting, performance management and service delivery systems so that participation can translate into action.

The systems failures

Our research involved collecting survey data and conducting qualitative interviews with 12 representatives across government, civil society and community media. Participants included government officials responsible for citizen engagement, monitoring and service delivery oversight, leaders of civil society organisations involved in social accountability initiatives and community radio practitioners who regularly facilitate dialogue between citizens and government. The findings reveal persistent challenges.

There is limited integration of citizen-based monitoring into core government systems. In many cases, citizen feedback mechanisms operate separately from formal planning, budgeting and performance management systems. This means complaints are collected but not systematically translated into government action.

There has been a decline in participation. Interview participants reported lower attendance at ward meetings and reduced public engagement with formal participation mechanisms, which they attributed to frustration with the limited government response to citizen feedback.

There are unclear institutional mandates, such as uncertainty over whether municipalities, provincial departments, ward councillors, or national government structures are responsible for responding to citizen complaints. This fragmentation diffuses responsibility for responding to citizen feedback across departments and spheres of government, allowing issues to fall through the cracks and leaving citizens without answers.

There is inadequate follow-through on citizen feedback.

Key drivers of this include:

• Weak institutional ownership: in South Africa, citizen-based monitoring is managed inconsistently across departments and municipalities. No single institution is clearly responsible for coordinating responses and ensuring accountability. As a result, citizen-based monitoring is frequently treated as a temporary project or pilot rather than embedded within core government functions such as planning, budgeting and performance management. This leads to weak accountability, fragmented implementation and inconsistent responses to citizen concerns.

• Digital exclusion: digital platforms as WhatsApp, Facebook, X and municipal reporting portals have added another layer to this dynamic. These platforms offer new opportunities for visibility and engagement but also expose the limitations of existing systems. This is highlighted in debates on open government, where transparency does not automatically translate into responsiveness. Institutions such as the UNDP governance programme emphasise the importance of models that combine digital and offline participation. Reliance on digital tools also risks excluding those without access to technology or the skills to use it.

• Donor dependency: many citizen-monitoring initiatives rely on temporary donor-funded projects. These often collapse once funding ends.

• Low public awareness: citizens don’t know about platforms they can use to report service delivery failures.

• Limited feedback loops: citizens don’t get updates on whether their complaint was received, investigated, or resolved.

The consequence is a growing sense of frustration among citizens. They begin to question the value of engaging with formal systems when their participation does not produce visible change. It leads to declining trust in public institutions and, in some cases, increased reliance on protest action.

Signs of progress

The study also identified positive factors such as enabling policy frameworks, structured capacity-building aimed at strengthening the skills of government officials responsible for citizen engagement and service delivery monitoring and the adoption of digital reporting and communication tools by government departments and municipalities.

The study recommends embedding citizen-based monitoring more directly into formal government systems such as planning, budgeting, performance management and municipal reporting structures. This will make it more likely that citizen feedback contributes to decision-making and accountability.

In practice, this would mean that complaints raised through ward committees, WhatsApp groups, municipal hotlines, social media, or community radio are formally recorded, assigned to responsible departments, tracked through digital systems, linked to municipal performance targets, and followed up with feedback to citizens on actions taken.

It also requires recognising the continued importance of local communication platforms such as community radio. These are important channels for engagement in many parts of the country, particularly where digital access is limited.

The success of citizen-based monitoring depends on whether governments respond to what citizens are saying.

The challenge is building systems that require government to respond. In Brazil, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre linked citizen priorities directly to municipal spending decisions.

In Kenya, the Huduma Kenya service model includes complaint tracking and service-request management. South Africa could adopt similar mechanisms: complaint tracking, response deadlines, public dashboards and direct links between citizen reports and municipal budgets.

Until citizen feedback is embedded into governance systems, participation will fall short of its potential.

– Does it help to report poor government service in South Africa? Study finds what’s missing
– https://theconversation.com/does-it-help-to-report-poor-government-service-in-south-africa-study-finds-whats-missing-283526

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Dan Paget, Assistant professor, University of Sussex

Public rallies were banned in Tanzania in June 2026 for the second time in a decade. The first ban was imposed by President John Magufuli in 2016. His successor, President Samia Hassan, lifted it in 2023 as part of a reform agenda. Now she has reimposed the ban. Dan Paget has spent over a decade chronicling the struggles of Tanzania’s democracy movement amid waves of repression. He’s had a special focus on a form of political communication that’s of extraordinary significance in Tanzania: mass rallies. He unpacks what this latest ban means.

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Why has Tanzania banned political rallies again?

Tanzania first imposed a ban on political rallies nearly a decade ago, in June 2016, to slow down opposition organising.

The ban was part of a wider authoritarian turn led by John Magufuli, who became president in 2015.

Samia Hassan succeeded Magufuli upon his death in office in 2021. She signalled a new era of democratic reform, but the most substantive change she has delivered was lifting the ban on political rallies in 2023.

Her government has now reimposed the ban, this time in the wake of a violent post-election crackdown in 2025.

The government has suspended mass rallies “until further notice” because it fears that they could trigger protests that spiral out of control.

Activists had named 7 July 2026 as the date for nationwide protests against political repression.

It has become clear that Hassan’s claim to a reform agenda was something that she wanted to signal, but not deliver. Legislative reforms proved to be hollow. More substantive reforms were kicked down the road.

Instead, everyday repression has increased. Activists have been arrested, attacked or abducted. The main opposition presidential candidate, Tundu Lissu, was arrested and charged with treason in April 2025. Fifteen months later, his trial has yet to be concluded.

In this context, mass protests unfolded on election day in October 2025. They were met by an unprecedentedly violent crackdown.

A government-sponsored commission of inquiry acknowledged that at least 518 people were killed, but it alleged this was largely done by professional foreign agitators. In reality, the death toll may have been far higher, and the violence was in all likelihood carried out almost entirely by state security forces.

Why are political rallies so important in Tanzania?

In Tanzania, rallies are not just for election campaigns. They are also the means by which political parties mobilise and organise between elections.

This is especially true for Tanzania’s leading opposition party, Chadema.

Chadema has built a nationwide support base. By 2015, it had achieved a grassroots campaign network that matched the long-dominant ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (in power since independence in 1961).

Chadema built its party apparatus using rallies. Its leaders spent months and years touring Tanzania town by town. They addressed citizens in public squares. They communicated their people power ideology and asked for volunteers on the spot. These volunteers were made the new members of local party branches.

Aspiring Chadema leaders used the same methods to organise at the local level. Lissu was one of those aspiring Chadema lieutenants. Together, they created a national movement. The rally was the vehicle for that movement-building.

Magufuli banned rallies in this context. He was attempting to put the brakes on opposition organising.

What’s different about this ban compared with the one a decade earlier?

Chadema has been trying to organise and rebuild just as it did after rallies were unbanned in 2023. But another context looms larger in this latest rally ban: the prospect of protest.

In years past, this would not have caused the government concern.

While Tanzania had a culture of mass rallies, it had no culture of mass protest. There have been protests, but they were localised or non-partisan or small, or all three at once. See, for instance, the Maasai protests against forced relocation and protests in Mtwara against a natural gas pipeline.

Careful government repression and deterrence have kept a lid on the scale and intensity of these protests. The absence of intense protests became self-sustaining – as no one had ever witnessed protests on a major scale, few ever joined them.

That all changed in the October 2025 election when anger at political repression and long-stalled living standards radicalised public opinion and fuelled mass protests.

Suddenly, the notion that protests could not happen in Tanzania evaporated. Tanzania’s democracy movement took on a new, popular form. A people power movement was born anew.

In this context, the potential role of the rally in Tanzania changes. Any rally can simultaneously be, or become, a protest.

This has changed the picture for Tanzania’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

It only managed to suppress protests in 2025 by resorting to bloody and brutal repression. It does not want to have to do so again – it learned how quickly protests can scale and become a threat to the regime itself.

What does this mean for Tanzania’s struggle for democracy?

In another context, the banning and unbanning of rallies might seem like small news: objectionable in principle, but politically inconsequential. Whether campaigners can hold rallies or not, they can get their message out on television and on social media. In such contexts, rallies are as politically significant as a bumper sticker.

But rallies hold great significance in Tanzania and are central to everyday political communication.

Survey data from 2015, the last time an election proceeded without significant repression, shows that 69% of people attended rallies. Not just one or two: they attended seven on average.

Indeed, in much of Africa, the rally takes on a wholly different role. It is one of the primary channels of communication. Survey data from Afrobarometer (2019-2021) across 33 countries on the continent shows that 35% of people attend campaign rallies. By contrast, rallies are attended by just 1% in the UK and between 5% and 7% in the United States.

Africa’s levels of rally attendance are sky high from global perspectives.

But gone are the days when an opposition rally might merely provide a foothold in a locality. Today, it may become the stone that starts an avalanche among the public.

It is this logic that lies behind Hassan’s decision to torch one of her few tangible reforms, and further deepen repression in Tanzania.

– Tanzania has banned political rallies again: what the government fears
– https://theconversation.com/tanzania-has-banned-political-rallies-again-what-the-government-fears-286663

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Cathy Wilcock, Research Fellow, University of Manchester

The revolution in Sudan in 2019 has been eclipsed by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023.

But the events of 2019 demand greater attention as they hold lessons for a post-war Sudan.

Music was central to the protests in 2019. The camp outside military headquarters in Khartoum, where demonstrators gathered for weeks to demand civilian rule, became known as Sudan’s largest ever arts festival.

My research on resistance movements has led me to believe that music is not only a cosmetic accessory to protests. In Sudan, it was an integral part of the revolutionary movement that ousted the Omar al-Bashir regime. For decades, music helped cultivate anti-government sentiment and forge the networks and communities that would sustain the revolution in 2019.

I’ve explored this idea in a recent paper, drawing on interviews with protesters and musicians.

Sudanese music and resistance

Music in Sudan has historically been intertwined with popular resistance. First against colonial rulers and then – following independence in 1956 – against post-colonial despots. The patriotic anthems of the 60s and 70s expressed the sentiment that Sudan was being built by the people, not the government.

As one music fan who was a young teenager in the early 1970s said:

There were different ideas, of course, about what sounded good, but if you were making music, you were against the government, that was for sure.

One after the other, however, authoritarian regimes sought to crush all creativity – and especially music – through censorship laws and the systematic intimidation of artists.

Gigs had to be held as private events in people’s homes and even these were regularly broken up by a morality monitoring unit. Many popular musicians left for careers abroad.

But underground music scenes kept anti-government sentiment alive.

My research shows that the exodus of musicians, producers and fans under the Bashir regime did not weaken popular resistance. Instead, this displacement helped build strong transnational social networks, enabling musicians to record music outside Sudan. This was then distributed back to communities inside the borders. Later, these same social networks supported the 2019 revolution.

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Read more: Songs of freedom: the soundtracks of political change in Sudan

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Throughout recent history and across various genres and scenes, music has helped the Sudanese imagine alternatives to authoritarian rule and build the relationships needed for collective action.

Given the close historical ties between resistance movements and music scenes, examining the music of the revolution provides insight into the values, identities and visions of democratic change that shaped Sudan’s revolutionary movement.

Music, gender and class

In my paper I analyse the most prominent revolution songs – collected in a shareable YouTube playlist – to explore what protesters’ choices reveal about the movement itself. The songs point to a growing openness towards gender and class.

At the 2019 protests, the revolutionaries honoured a canon of anti-oppression anthems. These included traditional Sudanese staples, hip-hop classics and contemporary pop sing-a-longs.

Not all revolutionary anthems are lyrically political, however, and there are gendered reasons for this.

In Sudan’s decades of patriarchal autocracy, speaking openly about politics through song lyrics was often far riskier for women than for men. As a result, women-led genres, such as tumtum and aghani albanat, typically centred on romance and everyday life, accompanied by handclapping and rhythms played on the doolka drum. Among highbrow creatives, these vocal and percussive genres are considered artistically subordinate to male-dominated genres. These include haqeeba, which features instrumental accompaniment on the more technically demanding oud.

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Read more: Omar al-Bashir brutalised Sudan – how his 30-year legacy is playing out today

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However, tumtum and aghani albanat were popular with protesters in 2019. This was not because their lyrics were directly political (they were not). Rather, they represented the defiance of women who continued to create and perform music despite decades of state restrictions on women’s artistry.

Despite their lyrical playfulness and political neutrality, Sudanese society celebrated these genres in the revolution. This sends a powerful political message about a rising cultural openness towards feminine creativity, which had been inhibited by the state.

Zenig is a new Sudanese genre of music. It emerged in the early 2010s from the poor and peripheral neighbourhoods in Khartoum. It takes its rhythmic base from tumtum, and mixes this with retro keyboards, low-fi synths and improvised vocals. It is fundamentally a Khartoumian invention, and is deliberately defiant of conservative gender and class hierarchies.

Zenig contributed to the cacophony of sounds during the 2019 sit-in. One protester remembered “its fast-paced rhythmic style worked well in energising crowds”. The most likely place to hear Zenig at the sit-in was in intimate circles and small stages where friends could dance together. Before the revolution, Zenig was known in Khartoum as the music of poor outcasts.

The significance

By elevating female leadership in the music of the revolution, Sudanese revolutionaries deliberatively negotiated what an alternative ideal Sudanese society would be like; one with more empowerment for women, as both creative and political forerunners.

The inclusion of genres like Zenig at the 2019 sit-in demonstrates that Sudan’s revolution was not only about changing the regime.

For many young Sudanese, it was also an expression of yearning for broader societal change and an upending of societal power relations.

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Read more: Ethiopia’s musicians fled the country after the 1974 revolution – how their culture lives on

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The revolution in 2019 was a unique time for openness, experimentation and future-making facilitated by music.

Music and rebuilding

The war has prevented Sudanese civilians from continuing these important social negotiations.

The resistance movement and its musicians have been displaced within Sudan and to regional hubs like Cairo (Egypt) and Nairobi (Kenya). Many have tragically lost their lives. Some have remained in Khartoum and continue to make hopeful music against the odds.

Even as Sudan’s future remains uncertain, music will be surely be central in the rebuilding of civilian lives that will come.

– The rhythms that broke Bashir: how Sudan’s music shaped a revolution
– https://theconversation.com/the-rhythms-that-broke-bashir-how-sudans-music-shaped-a-revolution-284963

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

Every year on 16 June, readers around the world celebrate Bloomsday, the annual commemoration of Irish writer James Joyce’s landmark 1922 novel Ulysses.

The date marks the single day on which the novel unfolds: 16 June 1904, when its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, wanders through the city of Dublin. What began as a literary observance has become a global celebration of reading.

In 2026 the festivities in Johannesburg had a special South African quality to them. At the centre of the event was South African writer and translator Sandile Ngidi’s isiZulu rendering of the character Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, the concluding episode of Ulysses.

As a scholar of African literatures, I am interested in how literary ideas travel. My research has shown how writers from very different contexts can grapple with similar political and artistic questions. Ngidi’s translation opens up one of the most challenging works of literature to new readers.

The isiZulu translation represents only a small portion of this vast and notoriously difficult novel. Ulysses is based on one ordinary day in the lives of three characters who live in Dublin. It uses their experiences to explore identity, memory, desire, and modern life in early 20th-century Ireland.

Since its publication, Ulysses has been formally translated into more than 40 languages, mostly within Europe. Its journey into isiZulu reminds us that literature travels most powerfully when it crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries and returns us to the urgent questions of our own time.

Translation as an act of imagination

Bridge Books, a community-centred bookshop in inner city Johannesburg, hosted the Bloomsday event, which also included readings from South African writers Ivan Vladislavić and Terry-Ann Adams.

By holding a multilingual Bloomsday celebration in parts of the city where anti-immigrant groups have been marching, the organisers underscored a simple but powerful point: the civic imagination at the heart of Joyce’s work remains relevant wherever diverse communities claim space through stories and conversation.

Ulysses is really about random and seemingly mundane interactions. Molly Bloom is one of the main characters, an opera singer who spends the day mostly in bed. Bloomsday is named after her and her husband, who is also a main character. He’s wandering the city remembering the death of their son, and stewing in the knowledge that Molly is having an affair. This is the universal drama of human life.

Ngidi’s translation matters. It challenges assumptions about which languages are considered suitable for conveying the so-called world literature. African languages are not peripheral to global literary culture but active participants in it, capable of carrying, reshaping and reinterpreting some of the most demanding works ever written.

In fact, reading Joyce in isiZulu raises larger questions about literary inheritance. Who owns a literary classic? Joyce himself was deeply concerned with the relationship between language and power.

Writing from a colonised Ireland, he grappled with the complexities of expressing Irish experience through English, the language of imperial rule. His work repeatedly explores tensions between local identity and global influence, between inherited forms and new possibilities.

James Joyce for everyone

The concerns in Joyce’s fiction have become even more pertinent. Across many parts of the world, debates about belonging have become increasingly fraught. In both Ireland and South Africa, questions of migration, national identity and cultural inclusion have generated political tensions and, at times, hostility towards foreigners.

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Read more: Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task

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Joyce is often regarded as a writer for specialists and university students. His novels have a reputation for difficulty that makes them seem inaccessible. Yet events like the one in Johannesburg suggest a different story. Joyce survives because readers continue to reinvent him, finding new contexts, new languages and new communities in which his work can live.

Translation, in this sense, is more than a literary exercise. It is an act of imagination that allows readers to encounter familiar questions from a different vantage point. Rather than simply reproducing Ulysses, the translation creates a new reading experience that illuminates both Joyce’s novel and the expressive possibilities of isiZulu.

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Read more: Wretched of the Earth has been translated into South Africa’s Zulu language – why Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary book still matters

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By carrying Joyce into isiZulu, Ngidi expands not only the readership of Ulysses but also the range of perspectives through which the novel can be understood.

The translation demonstrates that African languages are not simply vehicles for local experience; they are capable of engaging the most complex works of world literature while bringing new meanings to them.

– Ulysses in isiZulu: why an African translation of the classic Irish novel matters in today’s world
– https://theconversation.com/ulysses-in-isizulu-why-an-african-translation-of-the-classic-irish-novel-matters-in-todays-world-285381

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Marloes Janson, Professor of West African Anthropology, SOAS, University of London

Nigeria’s economic hub, Lagos, ranks among the fastest-growing cities in the world. Its huge population – estimated at around 20 million – and its rapid urbanisation contribute to a sense of life where survival hinges on improvisation and ingenuity.

Nigerian musician Fela Kuti captured the megacity’s chronic difficulties with the expression “impossibilityism”. Yet, Lagos is also widely regarded as a place brimming with possibility.

My research as an anthropologist with a focus on religion shows that a significant number of Lagosians turn to religion in the hope of converting the impossible into the possible. Religion is not only for spiritual purposes, but also a practical way to solve problems.

For a better life in Lagos, there are difficulties to overcome: economic uncertainties, infrastructure failures, governance issues, inequality and crime. To maximise their chances of success, a growing number of Lagosians combine elements from different religious traditions. A prominent example is Chrislam, which emerged in Lagos in the 1970s. It fuses Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices.

Although relatively small compared to the Pentecostal churches and reformist Muslim organisations that have mushroomed in Lagos in recent decades, Chrislam needs to be understood within a broader religious transformation.

This transformation is difficult to map. Scholars of religion tend to emphasise fixed religious boundaries rather than the improvisational ways in which people practise religion. In the media, religious encounters are often reduced to conflict and violence.

Chrislam may appear to be a marginal phenomenon, but understanding it is useful for developing a new perspective. It illuminates how urban Christians and Muslims live their religion and interact with one another in ways that exceed the stereotypical images of Nigeria.

Religious shopping

“Welcome to Lagos; here everything is possible,” were the words my research collaborator, Mustapha Bello, greeted me with when I first arrived in the megacity in 2010. I soon discovered what “everything is possible” means when I met the founder of Chrislam.

Nigeria is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians along a predominantly north-south axis. Muslim-Christian relations in the south-west, with Lagos as its centre, are far more dynamic.

In this region, Muslims and Christians have long lived side by side, often in close interaction with practitioners of Yoruba religious traditions. The latter believe that the material world is shaped by unseen powers, including the òrìṣàs (personalised deities) who are held responsible for good fortune. It is this particular religious mix that created the conditions in which Chrislam could emerge.

There are two main Chrislam movements. Ifeoluwa (“The Love of God Mission”) has a small congregation of about 50 followers. Oke Tude (“Mountain of Losing Bondage”) has grown to over 1,000 adherents.

In addition to their Yoruba names, they use “Chrislam” as a way to describe their faith. While the two movements share certain practices – like drawing on both the Bible and Qur’an and invoking Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad in their prayers – they also differ. The founder of Ifeoluwa, Tela Tella, lives a secluded life in a densely populated suburb of Lagos. The founder of Oke Tude, Prophet Dr Samsindeen Saka, uses modern media to spread his message of unity between Christians and Muslims.

This mixing and matching is locally described as “religious shopping”. According to the hundreds of self-identified religious shoppers I’ve interviewed over the past 15 years, those seeking health and wealth cannot afford to be picky.

Chrislamists, for example, explained that their faith enabled them to “hedge their bets” by “combining the powers in Christianity and Islam”, doubling their chances of achieving a “good life”. And the Oke Tude imam told me that he prayed eight times a day – five times in the Muslim way and three in the Chrislam way – in order to benefit from the cumulative power of prayer.

The Chrislam prayer involves running seven times around a replica of the Ka’bah – the most sacred site in Islam – while shouting “Hallelujah” and “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

The Chrislamists I studied actively crossed religious boundaries. This needs to be understood against the backdrop of an urban environment marked by uncertainty and instability, where two-thirds of Lagosians live below the poverty line.

In this context, it’s both pragmatic and strategic to draw on the perceived potency of both Christianity and Islam.

Debunking stereotypes

Chrislam challenges portrayals of Nigeria as a country defined by Islamist-Christian clashes. While religious violence is a serious concern in the country, my research shows that Christian-Muslim relations cannot be reduced to conflict alone.

Chrislam is far from an isolated case. Across multifaith settings in Africa (and beyond), one finds movements that combine elements from different religious traditions. They defy neat classification.

A notable example is the Afrikania Mission, which emerged in Ghana in the 1980s. It blends elements of Christianity with so-called African traditional religion. Religious boundary-crossing is an integral feature of contemporary religious life in Africa.

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Read more: Is there a Christian genocide in Nigeria? Evidence shows all faiths are under attack by terrorists

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It’s not that religious differences don’t matter in these movements. They do, but religious divergence does not automatically give rise to violence or polarisation. It can just as readily serve as a basis for copying, competition, and mutual exchange.

Indeed, Chrislamists see Christianity and Islam as complementary rather than contradictory. For instance, a dedicated Chrislamist responded to my question about whether he worshipped Jesus as the son of God (as in Christianity) or as a prophet (as in Islam) by saying “he is both”.

The founder of Ifeoluwa, Tela Tella, preached:

Jesus Christ is on my right-hand side, the Prophet Muhammad is on my left-hand side; they are two of my best friends.

Why this matters

In my view it’s time to rethink how we study religion in Africa by moving beyond western, Christian-derived conceptions of religious traditions as fixed and bounded.

An Afrocentric lens begins with African forms of knowledge, practice and meaning – how African religious practitioners actually live, blend and interpret religious traditions.

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Read more: God in Nigeria: the country’s novelists help us understand the complexity of Christianity

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Viewed through this lens, Africa does not appear as a passive recipient of the so-called world religions but as a powerhouse of religious creativity and innovation.

Chrislam is then no longer an oddity or contradiction, but a political resource in a place where religious identities are often weaponised.

It provides a lesson that today’s fractured world urgently needs. Religious boundaries need not function as battle lines; they can also serve as meeting points.

– Shopping for God in Lagos: what is Chrislam?
– https://theconversation.com/shopping-for-god-in-lagos-what-is-chrislam-285308

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Joshua Brahinsky, Researcher, Department of Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University

Do the world’s religions and contemplative traditions send people to the same place – compassion, bliss, awe, a sense of God, awareness, or the universe?

We conducted a study that asked a smaller version of this question.

As scientists with a research focus on brain science and spirituality, we ask whether people from very different spiritual traditions – Buddhism and Christian Pentecostalism – use their bodies in similar ways when they’re in intense contemplation.

To make this concrete, let’s play a game. Consider the following quote and ask if it sounds like a person engaged in ecstatic Christian prayer – speaking in tongues – or someone in a deeply quiet Buddhist meditative state known as jhāna.

I let go of everything … It feels like you’re falling. The first few times that happened to me, it was terrifying. I like to call it ‘slipping upward’ because it feels like a lifting to me…

Now consider this one:

It feels like a constant invitation to let go of more control, and the more control I let go the more powerful an experience it is … The more I let go, the lighter I feel…

Can you tell which is speaking in tongues and which is jhāna? The first was meditation; the second was tongues. If you got it wrong, don’t worry – even experienced contemplative practitioners identify them correctly only about half the time.

Our research suggests that these traditions, which on the surface appear so different, may, in fact, share a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. And further, that this mechanism might be a tool for self-transformation.

Meditation and tongues

It’s true that jhāna meditation and speaking in tongues could hardly look more different.

Jhāna is an ancient Buddhist practice from India, centred on intense concentration. Speaking in tongues is a Christian prayer practice in which worshippers utter a fluid string of speech that doesn’t have a semantic meaning.

In jhāna, the body is still. You sit. You do not move. From the outside, almost nothing seems to happen. The practice is deliberate, austere, and precise. Attention is guided – patiently and repeatedly – back to a single object, often the breath. Gradually, attention gathers. The mind steadies. A sense of ease appears – sometimes warmth, sometimes a spreading pleasure.

In deeper states, meditators describe absorption so complete that the sense of acting or choosing dissolves into something quieter.

Tongues prayer unfolds in a very different register. Sound spills out. Voices rise, overlap, and break apart. Bodies sway or tremble. Some people weep; others laugh. Some rock rhythmically. People may dance.

For those who pray this way, they feel the prayer is not produced by them – it moves through them.

Placed side by side, these practices appear to belong to different worlds. If you only watched, you would not confuse them. Yet when we listened closely to how practitioners described what it felt like from the inside, the contrast began to soften.

For this study we conducted in-depth interviews with 116 practitioners and then mapped their responses against neuroscience theory. The work continues. We are currently exploring the physiological (bodily function) side of the story to see if brain activity can be used to measure the pattern we observed at the level of experience.

Across many conversations – with experienced jhāna meditators and long-time tongues practitioners – we noticed a recurring pattern. Attention gathers. Feeling intensifies. And then, at some unpredictable moment, something releases.

A familiar rhythm

Whether in stillness or fire, the rhythm was familiar. The inner sequence was strikingly similar. Attention to the act of practising feeds arousal of the senses and emotions. Arousal, in turn, stabilises attention. Together, they facilitate the sense of reduced effort – until effort is no longer required at all.

A jhāna meditator told us:

I set the intention. Then I let go.

She described it as falling upward – quiet, buoyant – as though the experience were happening through her.

A tongues practitioner said:

The more I let go, the stronger it gets.

He spoke of shaking, of tears, of feeling small – of God taking over.

In both practices, attention and feeling work together. Intensity does not disrupt focus; often it sharpens it. Focus then allows the rest of the mind to let go. In the wake of surrender, both groups described emerging clarity, a sense that the process renewed their minds.

The science

We began to suspect that both practices rely on a simple loop – one that aligns well with predictive processing, a dominant framework in today’s neuroscience. It suggests the brain uses predictive models to perceive and navigate the world. We think that people, instead of seeing everything as fully new, have maps from their previous experience that allow them to recognise that, for example, a chair is for sitting on and that a creature with arms and a beard is a person.

The loop might work like this: attention is placed and held on something – the breath, God. As attention stabilises, the object grows vivid. That vividness brings pleasure, as the brain enjoys the experience of clarity in its effort to predict sensory input.

Pleasure, in turn, makes attention easier to sustain. What begins as effortful becomes easier. Control gives way to momentum and attraction. At a certain point, practitioners report that their familiar sense of “doing” falls away as what we call the Attention–Arousal–Release Spiral develops and deepens.

Finally, surrender enables a renewal, as their minds are refreshed by a momentary release of prior patterns of thought.

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Read more: How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

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Seen this way, our analysis argues that jhāna and tongues might be culturally distinct tools acting on the same human mechanism – a spiral of attention, arousal and release that enables renewal.

Why this matters

At a moment when religion is often experienced as a polarising force, this kind of research might offer a window into a shared foundation that we can all use to shift how we experience the world.

– Meditation and speaking in tongues: the surprising similarities between two spiritual practices
– https://theconversation.com/meditation-and-speaking-in-tongues-the-surprising-similarities-between-two-spiritual-practices-284215

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

The vulnerability of the world economy to oil prices was painfully visible in the first half of 2026 following the US and Israel war against Iran. The power of this commodity to upend economies has been apparent before. In his recently published book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, political economist Adam Hanieh provides an expansive history of the connections between oil and capitalism since the 1800s. Economist Imraan Valodia asked him about the book.

What was your motivation for writing this book?

A main motivation was a dissatisfaction with many of the standard ways of discussing the history of oil and its place in the global economy. Much of the dominant narrative around oil tends to invest it with some kind of innate power, separate from the social and economic logics of capitalism.

What I try to do in the book is foreground what these are. Things like the drive towards endless accumulation, the incessant speeding up of production and consumption, mechanisation and so forth. And I ask how these qualities have served to centre oil in our energy system.

So the book is not just a history of oil, but a history of capitalism seen through oil.

I also wanted to move beyond histories that are overwhelmingly focused on the US. It is obviously crucial to the story. But our oil-centred world was made through wider global relations. These included colonial extraction, the development of the Soviet oil industry, the transformations of post-Soviet Russia and, more recently, the rise of China and East Asia as central nodes in global energy demand, refining and petrochemical production.

Another major concern of the book is tracing what oil becomes after it is pumped from the ground, beyond simply a liquid transport fuel. So I examine areas such as the petrochemical industry (plastics, fertilisers, synthetic fibres and so forth) as well as oil’s crucial place in the contemporary financial system.

How important was the rise of the oil industry in the US, specifically the rise of Standard Oil?

Standard Oil (1870-1911) was owned by the Rockefellers. It established many of the organisational forms that would later define the global oil industry. John D. Rockefeller’s key insight was to grasp the power that came from controlling the whole value chain through which oil moves. Standard Oil integrated refining, transport, storage, pipelines, marketing and finance into a single corporate structure. It used its command over railroads and later pipelines to squeeze competitors, lower costs and shape the market around itself. Much of the subsequent history of the oil industry revolves around this basic lesson – corporate power comes from vertical integration, and the ability to control the infrastructures through which oil circulates.

The corporate structures built up around Standard Oil were closely connected to the wider architecture of American capitalism. Tax systems, corporate law, banking, capital markets and state policy all became central to how oil companies grew and operated. The later global dominance of US oil firms was built on these wider innovations, and remained closely tied to support from the US state.

We can see the legacy of this today. Many national oil companies, especially in the Gulf monarchies, are now pursuing similar strategies of vertical integration.

When did the Middle East emerge as a key player?

Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which was founded by Britain in 1908, exemplified the relationship between oil extraction and colonialism. The company’s rise in Iran depended on concessionary agreements protected by imperial power. Britain’s interest in Persian oil was closely tied to the needs of empire, especially the fuelling of the Royal Navy.

APOC became a way of linking Middle Eastern oilfields to British military and industrial strength. This set a precedent for the wider Middle East, where a handful of foreign oil companies sought long-term control over oil reserves, infrastructure, pricing and export routes.

This also shaped the subsequent political history of the Middle East. Oil became a focal point for struggles over sovereignty because foreign control of the industry revealed the limits of formal independence. Producer governments were often constrained by companies that controlled technical expertise, transport, marketing and access to world markets. In response, different forms of oil nationalism emerged, from demands for a greater share of revenues to full nationalisation.

Iran’s attempt to nationalise oil in 1951 under Mohammad Mossadegh is the most famous example. But the broader pattern was regional. Across the Middle East, oil became a battlefield for states and nationalist forces to challenge colonial domination and foreign corporate power.

The formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in 1960 and the later rise of national oil companies has to be understood against this background.

He sits at the intersection of finance, empire and the making of the modern oil industry. He was an Armenian businessman born in the Ottoman Empire, educated partly in Europe, who became one of the most influential intermediaries of early 20th-century oil. His nickname, “Mr Five Per Cent”, came from the 5% stake he secured in the Turkish Petroleum Company, the consortium that eventually gained control over Iraq’s oil. Unlike the other members of that consortium, Gulbenkian did not own a major oil firm, but he was able to broker the agreements through which the big western companies divided up access to Middle Eastern reserves. He was also very skilled at writing himself into history in dramatic and fanciful ways.

He is especially associated with the 1928 Red Line Agreement, in which the main shareholders of the Turkish Petroleum Company agreed not to develop oil independently across much of the former Ottoman Empire without the others. This was a key moment in the cartelisation of world oil, in which the control of oil (including pricing) came under the sway of a handful of large firms. The Red Line Agreement linked Middle Eastern oil to these international oil companies who fully managed production, prices and market access on a global scale. Gulbenkian’s 5% share is thus a window into how the oil industry was built through networks of imperial diplomacy and corporate collusion at the time of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.

What were the implications of the 1973 oil shock, during which oil prices quadrupled following an embargo by some Arab oil producing states?

It marked a rupture in the world economy because it revealed that the old structure of the international oil industry was no longer sustainable. For much of the 20th century, the global oil industry was controlled by just seven western companies, the so-called Seven Sisters. They controlled the extraction of oil in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as its refining, pricing, transport and marketing. But by the early 1970s, this system was being challenged by producer governments, especially in the Middle East and Latin America, and by the growing assertiveness of Opec.

The dramatic increase in oil prices after 1973 was a sign of this shift in power towards oil-producing states.

The implications were enormous. Higher oil revenues generated vast financial surpluses in the Gulf and other producer states, and these surpluses were managed and invested through the international financial system. They were recycled through US and European banks, invested in dollar-denominated assets, placed in US Treasury securities, and channelled into equities, real estate and other financial markets. This helped strengthen the position of the dollar and deepened the role of American financial institutions in the world economy. In this sense, the oil shock played a major role in creating the global financial architecture that we live with today.

Saudi Arabia was especially important in this process. The consolidation of the US-Saudi relationship in the 1970s linked oil, finance and military power very tightly together. Oil continued to be priced in dollars, which reinforced global demand for the US currency. Gulf surpluses flowed into American markets, while the Gulf monarchies became major purchasers of US weapons and military services. The consolidation of oil as the world’s leading fossil fuel was therefore increasingly intertwined with the reproduction of American power.

Why are you critical of the net zero emissions framework that’s key to climate change policy?

My criticism of the “net zero” concept is that it makes the climate crisis appear as a technical or accounting challenge, rather than a systemic crisis rooted in the dynamics of capitalism itself. The term entered the mainstream climate policy vocabulary through the Paris Agreement in 2015. In its basic form it means balancing ongoing greenhouse gas emissions with equivalent removals of carbon from the atmosphere. That might involve forests, soils, carbon capture and storage, or technologies that directly remove carbon from the air.

The problem is that this shifts attention away from the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption in absolute terms. It allows companies and governments to say they are moving towards “net zero” while still expanding oil and gas extraction, as long as those emissions are, in theory, offset somewhere else.

Many net zero strategies rely heavily on carbon capture and storage. This technology remains unproven at the scale required to deal with the volume of emissions produced by global fossil fuel use. Historically, carbon capture has often been used for oil recovery: captured carbon is injected into oilfields to extract more oil. So a technology presented as a climate solution actually becomes a means of extending fossil fuel production. Another important example of a false “solution” presented within the net zero framework is carbon offset projects. These turn forests and other ecological systems into financial assets that can be counted against emissions elsewhere. These projects have been linked to land dispossession and numerous scandals, including some across the African continent, and often rely on highly dubious accounting schemes.

– How oil turned the motors of capitalism: a history
– https://theconversation.com/how-oil-turned-the-motors-of-capitalism-a-history-286072

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Timothy Krupnik, Director – CGIAR Scaling for Impact, CGIAR

The world’s food systems face real and urgent challenges. These include climate change, nutrition insecurity, food safety, and unequal access to markets. Research has produced practical solutions to each of these that could benefit hundreds of millions of people. Too few are moved into widespread use.

For years, the development sector has flattered itself with pilots.

A new tool works in a controlled pilot, a crop variety performs well in a field trial, and a digital advisory service shows promise in early testing. Evidence is written up, a case study or experiment is published, and then comes the familiar refrain: now we need to “take it to scale”.

That is the moment the real difficulty begins.

Solutions do not spread simply because they are good. They move, or fail to move, through systems where scientific supply and demand for innovative solutions are frequently misaligned. Policy environments are not ready, financing is difficult to mobilise, demand is weak, and markets are not designed to carry promising ideas beyond their pilot phase.

These are some of the challenges that have faced CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research-for-development partnership focused on agriculture and food systems. But these challenges are not limited to CGIAR alone; they are common in research for development.

The world does not just need more breakthroughs. It needs more organisations that know how to turn scientific advances into adoption, investment and lasting use. Put plainly, it needs stronger efforts to move proven science into widespread use.

That sounds abstract. It is not. As director of CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact Program, which works with partners across Africa, Asia and Latin America to connect innovations with the systems and investments needed to scale them, I have seen this pattern myself. The evidence from that work consistently points to the same conclusion: scaling must be treated as a core part of the scientific process – built into research from the start, with systems thinking prioritised, not treated as a final phase.

What it takes to scale up

Scaling is about asking different questions earlier in the research process – identifying the challenges that prevent innovations from moving into use, and charting strategies and actions to overcome them. Not just: does this solution work? But: who will deliver it, who will pay for it, what incentive do they have, what regulations apply, what evidence unlocks funding, and what has to change in the surrounding system for uptake to last beyond a project cycle?

Those questions are rarely asked early enough in the research process. Yet they determine whether a promising idea becomes a public good or another stranded pilot.

One example of what this looks like in practice is a “clearinghouse” created under the African Development Bank’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation programme, now integrated into the CGIAR Scaling for Impact programme. Its role is not to invent new technologies, but to make proven ones usable at scale: validating them, packaging them with complementary innovations, and linking them to large public investments and agricultural delivery systems.

That model is now positioned to connect agricultural innovations to a US$1.5 billion AfDB-backed portfolio in 2026, expected to benefit 3.4 million additional smallholder farmers.

In Nigeria, it helped connect heat-tolerant wheat varieties – developed to maintain yields as temperatures rise – to an AfDB-financed programme backed by US$134 million, contributing to a sharp expansion in wheat area over two years. The point is not only that the varieties worked. It is that someone built the bridge between science and investment.

Sometimes the real bottleneck is not the innovation itself. It is the absence of systematic scaling support for the organisations working to deliver it.

That is why building scaling capacity matters. In 2025, Enabel, Belgium’s development agency, drew on the Scaling for Impact Program’s scaling fund to apply a structured approach to two African innovation projects: Tap & Track Asset Management in Uganda and the Abalobi Monitor fisheries platform in the Western Indian Ocean.

The value of the support, through the Scaling for Impact Program’s scaling fund, was not simply more investment. It was a more disciplined way of thinking about scaling. Enabel found the approach “practical” and “doable” because it surfaced constraints the teams had not previously recognised as part of the innovation system. These included government roles, how systems need to connect, institutional gaps and coordination failures.

For Tap & Track, that process fed into a medium-term scaling plan and a long-term ambition to reach 30 utility companies across seven countries. What the support produced most clearly was stronger planning and strategy. And that is precisely the point: scaling capability is itself part of the infrastructure of impact.

These examples point to the same conclusion.

We spend a great deal of time celebrating innovation and far less time understanding how innovations can be moved into use. But the gap between a successful pilot and a durable outcome is where much of the important and scientifically exciting work sits. It is where solutions are translated into investment cases, fitted into public and private delivery systems, adapted to institutional realities, and made credible to the actors who have to carry them forward.

That is why scaling should not be treated as a final phase or a dissemination exercise. It should be treated as a discipline. A capability. A scientific endeavour in its own right.

Good science remains indispensable. But it is not self-propelling.

The science to address food systems challenges exists. What remains insufficient is the systematic capacity to move proven innovations into widespread use at scale. Building that capacity and treating scaling with the rigour it requires is among the most important tasks facing food and agricultural research today.

– The world has the science to transform food systems. The next frontier is scaling it
– https://theconversation.com/the-world-has-the-science-to-transform-food-systems-the-next-frontier-is-scaling-it-282881

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rod Crompton, Visiting Adjunct Professor, African Energy Leadership Centre, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand

South Africa is moving away from coal-fired electricity, which currently supplies 74% of the country’s power, to wind and solar energy. But as the country’s experience shows, the transition is complex and is being slowed down.

This is because renewable energy works very differently from coal. It needs a different kind of electricity system and new ways of planning and managing the grid.

The transition also requires major changes at the state-owned electricity utility, Eskom, which has long dominated South Africa’s power sector. It involves transforming an electricity system built around a few large coal-fired power stations into one that can absorb power from many renewable energy producers while keeping electricity reliable, affordable and accessible.

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Read more: Competition in South Africa’s electricity market: new law paves the way, but it won’t be a smooth ride

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I’ve been working in the field of energy and economic regulation in South Africa for 40 years. I sat on the Eskom board for six years until I resigned in 2024 and I was involved in drafting key energy policies.

Based on my experience, I argue that there are five key factors slowing down the energy transition:

• Eskom’s dominance over the country’s electricity system

• inconsistent and politically driven government electricity planning, favouring certain technologies and restricting private energy providers

• a grid that has not been designed to keep up with technological change

• crumbling municipal electricity distribution networks and high levels of local government debt to Eskom

• inability of rooftop solar to sell surplus power into the grid.

These five problems are closely linked to slow-moving institutions, outdated ways of thinking, poor management and corruption. Many countries face similar challenges, but South Africa is a politically fractured society, with low trust in government, weak education systems and high rates of crime. All this shows in the slow pace of the energy transition.

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Read more: South Africa and renewable energy: a 12-year-old programme offers insights for countries moving to cleaner power sources

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The slow pace comes at a cost. Communities living near coal-fired power stations continue to face health risks. And South African exports could become less competitive as the European Union introduces border taxes on products produced with coal-fired electricity. The country’s coal-fired power stations continue to produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

Five bottlenecks

I have ranked the factors slowing the transition from most to least influential. Others may rank them differently.

The first bottleneck is Eskom: state-owned and slow to respond to change. It controls electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Because it controls so much of the system, Eskom has had the power to influence who can connect to the grid and how quickly new competitors can enter the market.

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Read more: South Africa’s power utility Eskom tried to block a gold mine from going solar – but lost in court

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Eskom is also struggling financially. As more households and businesses generate their own cheaper solar power, its sales have declined. It has tried to slow down the energy transition by challenging licences for electricity traders and by resisting plans to make the national transmission grid fully independent.

It has also backed expensive coal projects. In 2024, Eskom decided to extend the lives of the Camden, Grootvlei and Hendrina coal-fired power stations until 2030 at a cost of about R90 billion (about US$5.5 billion). That money could instead have gone towards new renewable energy projects that would have lasted much longer.

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Read more: South African court orders Eskom to disclose R70 billion coal and diesel contracts – why the ruling matters

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The second bottleneck is the government’s electricity plans (known as Integrated Resource Plans). They are supposed to set out the cheapest ways of providing the country with the electricity it needs. But instead, the government uses them to pick technologies that it prefers, like nuclear and gas, over cheaper renewable energies.

The country passed law setting up a wholesale electricity market, but in contradiction, the government intervenes in the market using the Integrated Resource Plans to limit the operation of market forces.

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Read more: South Africa’s plan to move away from coal: 8 steps to make it succeed

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The third bottleneck is the electricity grid itself. There are two problems here. The first is that South Africa’s grid was built decades ago to carry electricity from coal-fired power stations in the eastern province of Mpumalanga to the country’s main cities and industries. But the best wind and solar resources are mostly in the west of the country. So the grid now needs to become a two-way street, able to move electricity from west to east as well.

The National Transmission Company of South Africa (a wholly owned subsidiary company of Eskom) plans to build 14,500km of new transmission lines over the next decade to help this happen. Until then, some renewable energy projects have to cut back how much electricity they produce because the grid cannot carry it. Coal-fired power stations continue to fill the gap. Years of poor planning and Eskom’s financial problems have made this bottleneck worse.

The second problem is that managing a national grid with thousands of renewable energy providers is more complex than one based on a few coal plants. To keep the system stable, there have to be services in place to respond to sudden changes in power and to restart the grid after a blackout.

Wind and solar need a suite of such services. South Africa is still working out how to organise, fund and allocate responsibility for these services.

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Read more: South Africa finally has a masterplan for a renewable energy industry: here’s what it says

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The fourth bottleneck is crumbling municipal electricity distribution networks which create a serious risk to the electricity system. Local governments also owe over R100 billion (about US$6 billion) to Eskom, and this debt is rising fast.

Rising non-payment is worsening the problem, making it harder to fund and maintain electricity services. With weak public finances, government support is limited. Eskom has received R464 billion (US$28 billion) in bailouts. But some of these have gone towards covering losses linked to non-payment, crime and corruption.

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Read more: South Africa’s electricity supply: what’s tripping the switch

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The fifth bottleneck is is that renewable energy from rooftop solar systems is being wasted. Over the past five years, solar generation has shot up to about 8%-10% of total generation, powering about 3 million to 4 million households. Excess electricity generated is not used or sold back into the grid because municipalities and Eskom make it difficult and costly to do that.

When people disconnect from the grid, it reduces Eskom’s revenue and raises costs for those who remain. Over time, a weaker grid also makes it harder for large renewable projects to deliver power where it is needed.

What needs to happen next

To address the electricity crisis, the Presidency has set up a National Energy Crisis Committee. This is a collaborative effort by relevant national government departments, Eskom, and representatives from the private sector.

It has made progress but still faces many problems.

There is no magic solution for all these challenges. However, the focus of attention needs to be the establishment of a fully independent National Transmission Company. This will allow private capital to invest in removing the bottlenecks from the grid, and limit some of Eskom’s market power.

– South Africa’s move to renewable power is complex, but clearing 5 bottlenecks would speed it up
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-move-to-renewable-power-is-complex-but-clearing-5-bottlenecks-would-speed-it-up-286002