Average IQ South Africa: 72 South Africa Declares National Electricity Emergency

South Africa was once the rock of SubSaharan Africa. When Zimbabwe fell apart from incompetent government, there was always South Africa to provide employment, electricity, advanced health care, and other amenities. But reality is catching up to South Africa, as it did to Zimbabwe over a decade ago.

As reported previously here at Al Fin, South Africa's electrical power generation capacity has been stretched to the limits by criminally poor planning at the highest levels.

The government said that power outages would continue for some time: It said it aimed to “minimize… disruptive unplanned outages” and that its measures “will give us much more comfort within a two-year period.”

South African businesses have been crippled by the outages, which usually occur without warning, the AP said.

Neighboring countries Botswana and Namibia, which rely heavily on South African energy exports, have also been badly hit by the disruptions.

The government is proposing the following:

* Promoting solar water heaters and solar-power traffic and street lights.
* Introducing liquefied petroleum gas (LP gas).
* Distributing energy-efficient light bulbs.
* Introducing power rationing.
* Putting pressure on the coal industry, which is exporting its best quality coal, to provide local power stations with a higher quality coal.

Source
Other than output from the California State Government, it is very difficult to imagine a more idiotic list of "solutions" from a supposedly modern industrial country or region. What is South Africa's problem? According to many researchers in human intelligence, a nation with an average population IQ much below 90 cannot maintain a modern industrial technological infrastructure. In some countries, improving health and nutritional levels would raise national IQ significantly. Although heredity strongly impacts IQ, other factors are involved.

In Wikipedia's the IQ and the Wealth of Nations article you can find a tabular portrait of various national population average IQs. Although IQ is not destiny for individuals, for large populations the average IQ is extremely meaningful.
South Africa 72

An earlier Al Fin article explained that some nations can perform "above their weight class" in IQ, if they have a sufficiently talented, market dominant minority. The Smart Fraction Theory discusses that phenomenon. But what happens to such a country when it throws its "smart fraction" out--or removes it from meaningful control of national planning?

The same thing that happened to Zimbabwe and is happening to South Africa. The same thing that happened to Uganda and almost happened to Indonesia.

GNXP's The Coming Collapse of South Africa
Countries such as Haiti, and many sub-Saharan African countries, are perpetually in poverty and violence, as are nations with low population IQs in other parts of the world. Low population IQ correlates well with violence and poverty worldwide. Rather than denying the problem, an enlightened society would address the problem head on. Sadly, science in this area is being suppressed--not by right wing ideologues but by leftist ideologues.

A high technology infrastructure requires abundant energy--including electrical power. The failure of a society--whether in Africa or California--to plan for its future energy needs, is an invitation to future disaster.

For advanced western nations to be able to help the naturally disadvantaged peoples of the world, they have to understand the problems faced by the naturally disadvantaged--and address those problems honestly and directly.

There is currently no educational method, nor nutritional supplements, nor advanced medical procedure, that can make the populations of most the the third world capable of running high technology infrastructures. Perhaps in the next 20 years, such a thing will become possible. I certainly hope so.

For now, we need to deal with what is there, honestly.