In South Africa I would be very surprised if that ever happened. This is a country that went from exporting electricity to daily blackouts because of corruption.
Although your claim is literally untrue as the grid has been upgraded, the answer is: mostly the apartheid government. They left the ANC with a grid that served only 10% of the population, which makes it very difficult to upgrade, especially in a country with rampant poverty leading to cable theft, corruption, and general lack of infrastructure.
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.