Load shedding. The South African term for scheduled power cuts entered common usage sometime around 2008 and has not left since. At its worst, it has meant twelve hours a day without electricity for homes and businesses across the country, a grinding constant that has become so normalized that South Africans have developed an entire vocabulary and economy around it: apps that track the schedule, inverters and solar panels selling out within days of each stage announcement, diesel generators running in parking lots outside shopping centers that otherwise could not stay open. Eskom, the state utility that provides most of South Africa's electricity, is one of the most studied cases of institutional decline in the developing world. What was once a technically competent and globally respected power utility has been hollowed out by years of mismanagement, corruption, political appointments that displaced expertise, and deferred maintenance on generating infrastructure that is now old, unreliable, and deeply inadequate for a middle-income country of sixty million people. The scale of the problem is genuinely remarkable. South Africa, the most industrialized economy in Africa, has a generating capacity that falls substantially short of peak demand. The coal-fired plants that provide the overwhelming majority of current generation are aging and breaking down faster than they can be repaired. New generation capacity, whether from renewable energy or other sources, has not been added quickly enough to fill the gap. The consequences for the economy have been severe. South Africa's GDP growth has been suppressed for years partly by unreliable power; manufacturers that need consistent electricity cannot operate efficiently on a load-shedding schedule, and the cost of workarounds, diesel, backup generation, lost working hours, adds up across the economy in ways that compound. Foreign investors who might otherwise find South Africa's fundamentals attractive consistently cite electricity as a primary reason for hesitation. The political response has been fitful. The African National Congress government that has governed since 1994 spent years denying the severity of the problem, then acknowledging it while promising solutions that did not arrive on time, then agreeing to an energy emergency framework that has opened the door, somewhat, to private generation. Independent power producers have signed agreements for solar and wind capacity that is coming online. Rooftop solar has expanded dramatically among households and businesses that can afford it, creating a distributed generation sector that Eskom did not plan for and that is now both helping the grid and complicating its economics. President Cyril Ramaphosa established a National Energy Crisis Committee in 2022, and the load shedding hours have improved somewhat from their worst levels. The improvement has been meaningful enough to prevent a complete economic collapse but not meaningful enough to restore confidence. The target of ending load shedding entirely has been announced and missed multiple times. Underneath the energy crisis is a broader question about South Africa's political economy. The ANC, after thirty years of governance, is managing a coalition of interests that include public sector unions, state-owned enterprise employees, and patronage networks that have made genuine reform of institutions like Eskom extraordinarily difficult. The private sector is capable and frustrated. Civil society is active and organized. But the state capacity required to execute complex infrastructure turnarounds, to hire competent people, hold them accountable, and sustain institutional focus over a decade, has been depleted. South Africa remains the continent's most sophisticated economy, with financial markets, legal institutions, research universities, and industrial sectors that have no equivalent elsewhere on the continent. The scenario in which it navigates its current crises and emerges stronger is not implausible. But it requires political choices that the governing party has consistently found difficult to make. The electricity problem is, in this sense, a diagnostic. It reveals things about the state's capacity and the political system's incentives that have implications far beyond the power grid. How South Africa solves it, or fails to, will say something important about whether the institutional fabric of the continent's leading economy can be repaired.