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South African Protesters Threatened to Burn Down Nelson Mandela's Former Home

The demonstrators are angry about rolling blackouts and the state utility company’s switch to a prepaid billing system due to a high volume of unpaid bills.
Photo by Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Residents of Johannesburg's Soweto township blocked the road leading to former South African President Nelson Mandela's home as demonstrators threatened to burn the historic building during a protest against the country's state utility company.

The threats came after power company Eksom cited a high volume of unpaid bills and an overtaxed energy grid as the reason for implementing a new prepaid system for billing this week, moving away from the standard metered rates that allowed customers to pay only for what they had already used. More than a million Soweto residents are said to collectively owe Eksom more than $300 million.

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Protesters used rocks, tires, and other objects on Wednesday and Thursday to block the streets in Soweto. They set a fire in the road that leads to Mandela's house, which is now a museum to the former South African head of state, who died in 2013. Police also shot rubber bullets to disperse crowds of several hundred people.

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According to South Africa's News24, officials brought protesters into a meeting with Eksom, which provides around 95 percent of the total electricity in South Africa, but the demonstrators reportedly returned to the streets immediately after the talks. Crowds also threatened to burn down a local restaurant as police attempted to quell the unrest.

"We tried to clean the road last night and they went into the famous restaurant Sakhumzi… they said they wanted to burn that restaurant so that Eskom takes them seriously," Johannesburg Police Superintendent Edna Mamonyane said, according to News24. "The protest is still on. [Johannesburg Metro Police] are there to make sure that other people in the neighborhood are safe."

Eksom has said the goal of the prepaid bills is to help mitigate the level of debt the company has in unpaid funds. As the protests unfolded this week, Eksom officials announced another round of rolling blackouts across the country to deal with an ongoing energy crisis. The situation was sparked in part by aging infrastructure, and is arguably the most severe electricity shortage the country has seen since 2008.

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Both citizens and local business have been subject to recent blackouts, with some reports claiming the crisis is causing losses for international companies as well. British American Tobacco, the second-largest cigarette manufacturer in the world, said it has lost 5-10 percent in production output at its South African plant due to the unpredictable nature of the power cuts, Reuters reported.

South Africa's energy crisis has also been cited as a factor in reducing mining outputs. Earlier this year, the country's central bank reduced growth expectations for 2015 from 2.5 percent to 2.2 percent. Regularly scheduled blackouts began in November, and, while the problem was initially onlyexpected to last until the end of April, power cuts persist.

The 2008 electricity crisis was a first for South Africa, as aging apartheid-era power infrastructure began to collapse, reportedly costing the country 165 billion rand ($13.7 billion). Blackouts have since become normal. When South Africa's financial ratings took a hit in 2014, electricity problems were cited in the list of factors.

President Jacob Zuma has rolled out plans to implement a 9,600-megawatt nuclear energy program by 2023. A British American Tobacco executive said it was working with Eksom to establish a solar power farm that would produce energy for its factory.

The unrest in Soweto comes just weeks after xenophobic, anti-immigrant riots gripped the nation, with mobs of South Africans beating and harassing foreign nationals, accusing them of stealing their jobs. There were multiple deaths and dozens of injuries. Thousands of others fled to refugee camps, with some heading back home to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other nations with large immigrant communities in South Africa. High unemployment rates of nearly 25 percent are considered a main underlying factor in the attacks.

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