Just Access: The Real Transition - Episode 2: Rationed Rights

Just Access: The Real Transition is a 10-part podcast series from PARI (the Public Affairs Research Institute) exploring what a truly just transition means for South Africa — not only in energy policy, but in access to land, water, power, decision-making and economic opportunity.

Episode 2 asks a harder follow-up to the first episode’s core insight: if connection isn’t the same as access, how is exclusion produced and maintained?

Tasneem Essop returns to economist Dr Tracy Ledger, who explains how South Africa’s revenue-driven service delivery model has turned constitutionally protected rights into commodities. When municipalities and utilities depend on payment to survive, affordability becomes the real gatekeeper. In this system, poverty is effectively punished through rationed, unreliable, or delayed service.

The episode examines how infrastructure failures deepen inequality. Poor households and small businesses often cannot afford coping strategies like generators or water storage. Outages therefore hit them hardest. At the same time, broken infrastructure is frequently repaired more slowly in poorer areas, while underinvestment in township and informal settlement networks creates a two-tier system of reliability. Some communities are able to absorb shocks; others are left in prolonged uncertainty.

The gap between what is budgeted and what is delivered reveals another layer of exclusion. Millions of households are funded each year for free basic services, yet far fewer actually receive the benefits in practice. As affordability pressures intensify and municipal finances strain, the policy challenge is not only increasing support, but ensuring that allocated funds reach the households they are meant to serve. Reform proposals include removing free basic service funding from discretionary municipal allocations so that basic access cannot simply be deprioritized.

Finally, Episode 2 reframes the Just Energy Transition itself. A narrow definition focuses on compensating workers and regions affected by decarbonisation — justice in the “journey.” PARI’s approach insists that justice must also define the “destination.” An energy transition that leaves affordability and reliability unchanged will reproduce existing inequalities. A just transition must therefore redesign the system itself, ensuring that electricity and water are accessible in practice, not only in principle.

Subscribe to follow the full series, and to learn more about PARI and their research, visit www.pari.org.za