The lights are on in South Africa and many people are suspicious

South Africa is enjoying a rare streak of uninterrupted electricity right before elections, drawing more suspicion than praise in a nation that’s become accustomed to the daily power cuts that have dragged on for years. The country is currently in its fourth successive week of no outages — the longest period South Africans have consistently had electricity supply in more than two years. The recovery coincides with political parties ramping up their campaigns before the May 29 vote, in which the ruling African National Congress (ANC) risks losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in three decades. Almost two-thirds of people in a BrandMapp-Silverstone survey last year said they’d consider not voting for the ANC because of power cuts. A prolonged resumption of the outages is likely to result in a lower voter turnout — a scenario that could work in favour of the main opposition Democratic Alliance, which has previously had a good record in getting its supporters to cast ballots. The DA has put the improved power supply down to the state quadrupling the billions of rands it spends on diesel to run emergency plants over the past four years. The government insists it’s the result of the work state utility Eskom has done on repairing its facilities.