The Emadlangeni local municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, which falls under the Amajuba district covering the coal town of Utrecht, remains the only municipality in the country still struggling with access to electricity.
The results were revealed by statistician-general Risenga Maluleka during the Statistics South Africa handover of the 2022 Census report to President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday.
“Emadlangeni [72.1%] is now the only municipality with less than 80% of households having access to electricity for lightning,” said Maluleka.
Apart from that, only 26% of the total population lives in small rural towns of Berouws, Waterval, and Kingstown, which were mostly developed during the discovery of coal.
Coal was once the backbone of the local economy.
The Census 2022 report, which was the fourth census to be conducted since 1996, also shows that access to piped water for households improved except for the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.
The two provinces have been transgressing since 2011.
Ramaphosa hailed the country’s progress towards educational access, saying the majority of citizens possessed at least a secondary education.
“We have made tremendous progress because it shows that the number of people who have grade 12 are more than what we had in [the 1990s], in fact they have doubled and this is the real revolution,” said Ramaphosa.
“The real key change in our country, especially as we remember what apartheid did to a key and central life-determining aspect, is education.”
The data also shows that informal dwellings had substantially been reduced with more people living in decent housing structures.
Based on Census 2022 findings, a total of 17.8-million households were recorded in South Africa, an increase from the 14-million households recorded in 2011.
This includes formal and informal dwellings.
In 2022, more than 80% of households in the country had access to piped water, either inside their dwellings or in their yards, and over 90% of households had access to electricity for lighting, an increase from 58% recorded in 2011.
The Western Cape has the largest population with access to electricity at 88.7% followed by Gauteng at 85%.
