The South African energy crisis began in the latter months of 2007 - it’s hard to believe that almost 16 years later there does not appear to be an end in sight. The impact of this upon our collective psyche was the subject of a recent analysis carried out by University of Johannesburg Professor Talita Greyling.
Greyling, a well-being economist, looked at the crisis of load-shedding and provided statistics to show how the continuous blackouts are impacting our emotions.
Her analysis comes as no surprise and reveals the following. : “The emotions Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness almost doubled comparing 13 -16 April 2022 to the same period in 2023 (see Figure 1) with the announcement of stage 6 load-shedding and rumours of a looming stage 10 load-shedding. Stage 10 load shedding implies that citizens will only receive 40 hours of electricity in a 96-hour (4-day) period. Happiness levels decreased markedly from 6.8 (the average for 2022) to 6.6”
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Source: GNH.today Project ((https://gnh.today/)
She found that people are angry due to the lack of electricity and the inconvenience of not having power, are fearful of losing their jobs and fear their children will lack a quality education due to not having access to essential services when they need to study. They were also disgusted at the inability of ESKOM and the Government to address the problem. A feeling of sadness was ascribed to the bleak outlook of the future.
Add to this higher inflation rates, rising interest rates, and a struggling economy, and it’s easy to understand why South Africans are in a negative head space.
Greyling went on to report: “Surging negative emotions can lead to action such as violent demonstrations and civil unrest, though one should remember that all emotions are present in a country. Positive emotions such as joy and trust (positive) (government and society) can act as 'active ingredients in coping and thriving despite increasing negative emotions. It has been shown that “hope” is an essential element of positive emotions. From a policy point of view, increasing “hope” can be nurtured by revealing clear transparent plans to address load shedding”.
“From the literature, we know that negative emotions are not direct measures of mental health. However, negative emotions are often highly related to mental health, such as feelings of depression and losing interest in life.”
The Happiness and emotion levels are measured using the GNH (Gross National Happiness ).today Index (https://gnh.today/). The project was launched in April 2019 by Prof Talita Greyling (University of Johannesburg), Dr Stephanie Rossouw (Auckland University of Technology) and Afstereo to measure the real-time emotions and happiness levels of South Africans. They construct the indices by extracting real-time tweets from Twitter, encoding them using Natural Language Processing (machine learning methods) and applying a balancing equation to derive Happiness and eight emotion measures per hour and daily. The project received the Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Award for Innovation in 2021—furthermore, the GNH. Today data was accepted as official statistical data by New Zealand, the world leader in well-being policy.
