Although we as South Africans may put up with continuous rolling power cuts as if it were poor weather, we shouldn’t have to. Now, after President Ramaphosa’s recent address directed at loadshedding, it seems the government is finally getting on board – at least, in rhetoric.
Ramaphosa spoke at the Black Industrialist Conference today, where he pressed that the need to end loadshedding is now urgent. Ramaphosa relayed the common sentiment that loadshedding is causing “such damage to our economy and such disruption to our society” as eNCA reports. He later tied loadshedding to a hindrance on black industrialists as well as other players in the South African economy – factors all leading him to premise the matter as urgent.
The situation has in reality, long been urgent, especially from an economic standpoint. As finance minister Enoch Godongwana conferred, frequent outages have caused our economy to underperform by 40%, as per BusinessTech.
Noting that actions have been made in the last four years to transform the energy landscape in SA, the president concurred that these measures weren’t enough. As such, he indicated that the government would announce a ‘package of measures’ that will hopefully combat the energy crisis for good.
Just words or a tangible plan of action?
The president’s announcements might be accused of being mere words, but nods from Eskom’s Chief Executor Officer, Andre de Ruyter paint a hopeful path for loadshedding’s slow-down.
According to de Ruyter who spoke to Reuters, more power generation units are coming online at the state power utility, and hopefully, we will be out of loadshedding’s recent chokehold as soon as the end of next week.
In order to ensure that this isn’t a quick fix, De Ruyer explains that what’s needed is additional capacity. Ramaphosa noted after a walking tour with de Ruyter that the government will come up with proposals, or a ‘package of measures’ – details the country eagerly awaits to hear.
Although little information has been provided on what these ‘package measures’ might be, some suspect that we may turn to China to increase our power capacity – at least in a blueprint model.
This comes after Ramaphosa said in a speech to the South African Communist Party that South Africans should “begin to imagine” a future similar to China’s in terms of having a number of state-owned electricity companies, which create the competitive element South Africa lacks.
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