Power to the people in South Africa: Operation Khanyisa! and the fight against electricity privatization. (Privatization: Rip-Offs and Resistance).

JOHANNESBURG - "It's a criminal gang," announced Jeff Radebe, the African National Congress (ANC) Minister of Public Enterprises, at a December news conference.

He was blasting activists of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) for their Operation Khanyisa! -- Reconnect the Power! -- campaign. Over six months, more than 3,000 families had their electricity supplies illegally switched back on, after being left in darkness when they could not afford to pay their enormous monthly bills. SECC volunteers risk electrocution to do the work, and charge their neighbors nothing for the service.

Radebe, ironically, is a leading member of the South African Communist Party. In May 1999, when Thabo Mbeki was elected president, Radebe was mandated to privatize and commercialize Pretoria's largest government-owned enterprises.

The Soweto confrontation was not his first brush with activists who brand him a sellout. In August, he used similar language to scorn the two million member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which embarked on a two-day national strike against the planned privatization of electricity, telecommunications and transport. Mbeki and Radebe were furious because the strike distracted attention from the UN World Conference Against Racism, which opened in the South African city of Durban the next day.

The Electricity Supply Commission, still known by its Afrikaans acronym, Eskom, is the most important South African government-owned enterprise, and the fourth largest non-petroleum power company in the world. It proudly claims to be one of the New South Africa's success stories, having provided electricity to more than 300,000 new households each year. Yet many tens of thousands cannot afford the full-cost-recovery policy (meaning that each consumer must pay the full cost of the electricity they use, without subsidies from industrial and other large users to small consumers) that Pretoria's minerals and energy ministry adopted in 1998.

CHARGES AGAINST ESKOM

The policy of cutting off those who cannot afford their bills as generated sparks for an enterprise that has long been a lightning rod for controversy. Virtually all black South Africans were denied Eskom's services until the early 1980s, due to apartheid racism. Even $100 million worth of World Bank loans to Pretoria for expanding Eskom's grid between 1951 and 1966 explicitly left out all black neighborhoods, and is one reason that local activists are demanding reparations from the Bank. As a result of the Eskom blackout, the black South African townships were perpetually filthy due to soot from coal and wood burning.