www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world

This sentence gets the timeline wrong by about a decade.

Eskom’s own historical account says “rolling blackouts … began towards the end of 2007” and that Eskom was forced “in early 2008” to introduce load-shedding. A South African government statement from March 6, 2014 likewise said that the 2014 event was “the first time load has been shed since 2008.”

So if the article is referring to the recurring nationwide electricity outages South Africans call rolling blackouts or load shedding, they did not begin in 1998. What happened in 1998 was a policy warning: officials later pointed back to a 1998 white paper that had predicted future shortages if new capacity was not built. That is different from outages actually having started that year.

The article lumps Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma together with Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang as health ministers who publicly pushed garlic/beetroot/potato-style remedies for AIDS. The documented record does not support that attribution.

The Presidency’s official biography says Dlamini-Zuma served as Minister of Health from 1994 to 1999 and then became Minister of Foreign Affairs from 17 June 1999 to 10 May 2009. A separate South African government biography says Tshabalala-Msimang was Minister of Health from 1999 to 2008.

The notorious garlic/beetroot episode happened years later. For example, The Guardian’s 2006 editorial on South Africa’s AIDS policy stated that “Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister, was rightly lambasted this summer for recommending using garlic, beetroots or African potatoes” against AIDS symptoms.

So the article is wrong to present Dlamini-Zuma as one of the ministers who gave those garlic/beetroot remedy press conferences. The public episode it describes is associated with Tshabalala-Msimang, not Dlamini-Zuma.

This sentence is inaccurate in two ways.

First, police do not prosecute crimes in South Africa; prosecutions are handled by the National Prosecuting Authority and the courts.

Second, the claim that authorities had “essentially stopped prosecuting” rape is contradicted by official justice statistics. In a February 15, 2022 speech, Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said 5,451 sexual-offence cases had been finalised with a verdict and 4,098 convictions obtained, a 75.2% conviction rate. A later Department of Justice annual-report summary for 2022/23 said the country still achieved a 74.3% conviction rate in sexual-offences cases, with convictions increasing from 3,402 to 3,460 year over year.

Those figures do not mean South Africa’s rape response was adequate; they do show that rape prosecutions were still occurring on a large scale. So the article’s statement that police had essentially stopped prosecuting rape is factually wrong.