Emergency Power: Time, Ethics, and Electricity in Postsocialist Tanzania (original) (raw)
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The prepaid electric meter: Rights, relationships and reification in Unguja, Tanzania
World Development, 2018
Link to final publication: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WWNt,6yxD6jCC Sustainable Development Goal 7, with the light bulb and power button as its symbols, in e ect promotes the universal right to basic electricity services. Access for all demands both affordability and cost-recovery, and utilities (and donors) increasingly require users to shoulder the greater burden of cost-recovery. We argue that the electricity system is underpinned by a set of relationships among user, provider and the service itself: these relationships are mediated by the meter, the technology of commodification. Using a constant-comparison approach, and based on a year of interviews and document analysis, we compare postpaid and prepaid meter regimes in Unguja, Tanzania. We ask: what difference does the mode of payment make to the (residential) user, the utility, and to the prospects for meeting SDG 7? We find that the prepaid meter becomes reified with its automated monitoring and measurement mechanism, rendering the once-familiar meter reader obsolete, and shutting off the flow of electricity as soon as the customer's "units" have run down. Reification makes the utility more invisible to the customer, who now blames the meter rather than the utility for poor service or high bills. Our interviews reveal broad support for the prepaid meter, however, because economically vulnerable users expressed greater fear of debt than of the dark, and were willing to cede control of their consumption to the new meter. These findings undermine the common accusation of a "culture of nonpayment" in Africa. We also find that prepaid meters may incentivize the partial return to biomass-based fuels when cash is not available -- exactly the behavior that universal access to electricity is supposed to prevent. We conclude that, if access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa becomes entirely contingent on payment prior to use, this is not fully compatible with a commitment to universal basic access.
Cutting without Cutting Connection: The Semiotics of Power Patrols in Urban Tanzania
Signs and Society, 2021
Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.
Digital Geography and Society, 2022
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's "rationality" for the deployment of the digital technologies, and the ways in which actors incorporate social relations into these systems and negotiate them through these systems. Specifically, we consider the politicians, donors, residents of Kibera and informal power distributors. We show how upon the deployment of the digital systems in Kibera, residents and informal power distributors enact rationalities that conflict with those of the utility provider, donors and politicians. These conflicting rationalities make the formalisation of electricity provision in slum areas through "technological fixes" a particularly daunting task. Ultimately, we contend that this study of actors' conflicting rationalities in the deployment of digital prepaid electricity systems is an important contribution to studies of digital geography as it explains the complexities relating to digital interventions and offers critical perspectives on their hybrid outcomes and politics within contested urban geographies in the global South and elsewhere.
Illegal electricity connections and meter tampering is a worldwide issue which influences government on all levels of revenue collection. In South Africa, a connection is deemed unlawful when it is linked to the Eskom network without Eskom’s authorization, and it typically involves connections to overhead poles and mini-substations (Eskom, 2018). Illegal connections don’t only pose a threat to electricity service providers or the government, but it also poses a threat to the lives of children and innocent people because of possible electrocution. Electricity thieves are looting the country of Billions of Rands on an annual basis. Every electricity payer or taxpayer for that matter are facing electricity charges that are above-inflation levels, and it influences all consumers from low to medium income households (Khanyisa, 2016). It is said that there are four possible strategies for illegal electricity connection, and the four categories include billing asymmetries, the tampering of meters, hook-ups and unsettled bills (Marangoz, 2013:1). Billing asymmetries or irregularities and unsettled bills are two categories which are mostly used as a financial technique by local government to improve revenue collection, however, meter tampering and hook-ups are two areas which are very technical and further research will have to be done. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the ways of detection, policy, remarks and possible solutions for illegal electricity connections.
Energy for Sustainable Development, 2012
ABSTRACT Electricity theft is a growing problem worldwide. Conventional, technology oriented means for combating the problem have often showed their limitations. This paper qualitatively examines the phenomenon of theft in two distinct developing contexts. The purpose is to show the merits of applying a grounded, socio-technical and relational analysis for understanding and addressing electricity theft in particular, and for realising sustainable energy systems in general.Material has primarily been obtained through ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where a centralised system provides the rural population with electricity. Furthermore, fieldwork and a household survey were conducted amongst customers and staff in the Sunderban Islands, West Bengal, India, which has a distributed system of supply. Zanzibar and the Sunderbans differ in their types of electricity governance structures, technologies, organisation and procedures for metering, billing and supply, as well as in their socio-cultural setting. Nevertheless, in both places customers' moralities and degree of compliance are conditioned by their relationship to their supplier and the particularities of the socio-technical system of provision in which this relation is formed. The issue of trust is central and the findings show how people's level of trust in their supplier becomes jeopardised in both places, but for rather different reasons. Suggestions are provided as to how analytic attention to the customer–supplier relationship, and the material objects that mediate and shape it, could be used for increasing electricity customers' degree of compliance and for promoting sustainable energy systems in general.
Afrique Contemporaine, 2017
This article analyzes the ideological role of race in Tanzania's power sector by tracking the debates over two privately-owned thermal power companies, Independent Power Tanzania Limited [IPTL]/Pan African Power [PAP] and Richmond Development Corporation. Originally contracted as "emergency power" providers, both companies have become a long-term part of Tanzania's electricity generation mix. Both have also been sites of spectacular rent-seeking collaborations between Asian financiers and African politicians, much to the dismay of Euro-American donors. The ensuing scandals and political rhetoric highlight how postsocialist liberalization revitalized debates over race, creating complex new lines of sociopolitical recrimination, and ambiguous mixtures of official and de facto privatization.
Money, Mobile Money and Rituals in Western Kenya: The Contingency Fund and the Thirteenth Cow
African Studies Review 2018
This paper, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term. Résumé: Basé sur des recherches de terrain dans l'ouest du Kenya de 2012 à 2016, cet article décrit comment des rites du cycle de vie sont mobilisés pour collecter et distribuer différentes formes d'objets de valeur, y compris la terre, la propriété, la personnalité, les animaux, l'argent comptant et l'argent numérique. Spécifiquement, nous examinons un rite de puberté pour des adolescents. En organisant plusieurs formes d'argent relatives aux phases d'une vie humaine, le passé et le futur, ces rites aident à gérer et transférer la richesse à travers les générations et donnent à ces transferts des dimensions sociales et morales. L'étude amène vers une critique des nouvelles initiatives financières introduites dans les pays du Sud qui souvent estiment que les objectifs des pauvres ne sont qu'à court terme.
Anticipatory infrastructural practices: The coming of electricity in rural Kenya
A B S T R A C T This paper explores how the extension of the national electricity grid in a village in rural Kenya affects households' energy using practices. Based on ethnographic research, this paper examines how people act while anticipating electricity as well as what energy practices emerge as part of life with a partial presence of electricity infrastructure. Drawing on anthropological infrastructure studies and STS, the paper suggests members of a community participate in the formation of an electricity infrastructure through their preparatory practices. The making of electricity infrastructures through anticipatory actions has not yet been subject to research, but as the article argues, it is precisely by acquiring competences like stacking of resources or adjusting to breakdowns and volatile electricity prices that energy infrastructures are composed. The paper further argues that certain objects of anticipation allow for making preparations in relation to uncertain electric and political futures. By leveraging the notion of anticipatory infrastructural practices the main contribution of this article is to enrich the understanding of participatory politics to also encompass mundane actions related to energy distribution and use. This is relevant in anticipation of a future where a dramatically higher number of people will become grid connected.