South Africa used to have some of the cheapest power in the world. I have a friend who grew up there and he said it had never even occurred to him to calculate the cost of running a 100W bulb before he moved to the US. Further, at one point the electrical grid (and most infrastructure) was considered some of the best in the world. For me, it’s telling that solar is cost effective at all given how cheap and stable their power was 20 years ago. By all accounts the corruption in the country has grown to make their power unreliable enough that solar makes sense.