In the face of power cuts, South Africa's IT engineers keep the country running

Source: Pexels

The humble techie, usually working out of sight and historically located on the lower floors, would certainly have been my choice for 2020 when we all discovered very quickly how important functioning ICT links were for our continued business, education and social effectiveness.

Indeed, just as TIME occasionally confers Person of the Year status on inanimate objects like the personal computer (1982) or on a collective (The Protestor, 2011), South Africa missed an opportunity by not awarding National Order status to ‘the IT engineer’ as a group.

We can remedy this by taking stock of where we are now as a country and acknowledge the continued success of a few in the midst of the repeated failures of so many.

I suggest recognising the IT engineer as Person of the Year for 2023 because this year is turning out to be South Africa’s watershed moment. As load shedding deepens and those 2.5 hours of darkness morph into four hours of misery for the masses while the middle class still somehow manages to cling on, it is the geek who daily scrambles to keep us connected.

Not only have I personally witnessed, and led, the challenges of keeping networks and systems somehow running with no power coming in for hours on end; many of us in 2023 are increasingly noticing friends and relatives in the ICT sector excusing themselves from social events to attend to yet another after hours, Eskom-created communications emergency.

While South Africa’s economy was growing at around 3% annually for years and Eskom somehow wasn’t thinking these extra goods and services might one day require more electricity, the techies were - thank goodness and thank your lucky stars - quietly laying the foundations for South Africa’s future energy resilience by steadily building high-speed fibre optic networks across the length and breadth of the 1.2m square kilometres that remains our very dear South Africa.

In seven years, according to the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), South Africa’s high-speed fibre subscriptions skyrocketed from an unimpressive 31,843 to a staggering 1.3m more recently.

While the price of mobile data has declined rapidly, the financial impact of the pandemic would’ve been significantly worse had the nation’s techies not diligently laid down that fibre. Imagine trying to work, study and maintain social contact over mobile. Today, I can stream quite affordably over wireless, but three years ago? Forget it.

Now, again, the country’s IT corps comes to the nation’s rescue. With Eskom on the blink since 2007, there can’t be a group of ICT professionals anywhere in the world that have performed so admirably under such ridiculous conditions. I was going to write ‘challenging’ but a decade-and-a-half of load shedding is, in fact, ridiculous.

However, as is usual on the Bright Continent, there is significant upside in the fact that South Africa’s ICT infrastructure is emerging as a model of resilience as new skills are learnt.

Furthermore, there’s the obvious fact that the world’s going renewable and we seem to be getting there sooner than we would have.

Let’s soldier on and thank the men and women in the trenches.