It is far worse, but South Africa has an inept and corrupt government, I wonder what the excuse is for Texas?

I suspect the truth is, in the narrow domain of electric power distribution, Texas too has an inept government that’s beholden to certain vested interests in the garb of “free markets”.

This is a state that has fetishized “light touch regulation” so much that it, for most of the state, has its own grid to avoid dealing with Federal authorities. And repeatedly failed to take action to get power companies to winterize their equipment even though cold snaps in Texas are not unheard of — they’ve had disruption in 1989 and 2011, in addition to other near misses.

Let’s not even get into the wisdom of a market that allows Griddy to offer wholesale prices without caps to retail customers.

> I suspect the truth is, in the narrow domain of electric power distribution, Texas too has an inept government...

This is an absurd comparison. South Africa owns and runs its power utility. The result is that they struggle to provide electricity on an ongoing basis. According to Wikipedia, small business owners in South Africa said that load shedding was the number one challenge that they faced in Q1 of 2019.[0]

Texas does not own or run its utilities. They are privately run, and are given wide latitude by the state. The result is that the worst of the utilities are tragically only able to provide 99.95% uptime, with some power consumers experiencing outages for a few days per decade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

Yes, Texas in the realm of power distribution is probably a paradise by comparison with South Africa, but compared to its peers (other US states), Texas has a very non-resilient, or fragile, power distribution system that we know will "crash" when faced with a cold snap. Given that they have known this since at least 1989, I think it's not unfair to use the word "inept".

The giant power bills are just icing on the cake of bad policy-making.

So hang on, why is it that South Africa is “corrupt”, but Texas is “beholden to certain vested interests”?

The distinction-without-a-difference between these two phrases is exactly the point of the comment you're responding to.

...and presumably also the point of the comment it was responding to.

Did any one person say both of those things?

That's just more words for corrupt

Why would you think it is any different? ERCOT was recommended to protect its power generation capabilities from severe winter weather for over 10 years, yet the Republican leadership did nothing about it. That's either corruption or sheer ineptitude.

There is no comparison.