Pretoria - DA leader John Steenhuisen has asked for an urgent meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa over the growing energy crisis and the state of Eskom.
Steenhuisen made the request after the country was placed on stage 6 load shedding indefinitely, which is a concern for businesses and ratepayers.
He said Eskom was in a death spiral and the government had no will to do anything about it because the ANC’s vast patronage network benefitted hugely from the status quo.
“I have written to President Ramaphosa to request an urgent meeting about Eskom and the growing power crisis, which now has South Africa on stage 6 until further notice,” said Steenhuisen.
“I want to hear from him first-hand why his government refuses to implement the very obvious solutions to this crisis. These solutions have not changed.
“Both the DA and many energy experts have been proposing them for years: unbundle Eskom into separate transmission, distribution and generation entities and open the market for electricity generation to private power producers; appoint skilled engineers to run the transmission, distribution and generation elements of Eskom, and stop all political interference; declare a ring-fenced State of Disaster in order to exempt Eskom from all obstacles to efficient spending and rapid decision-making, such as localisation and BEE legislation; and ramp up security at all key Eskom sites and deal decisively and harshly with saboteurs.
“Do everything possible to enable private generation to come online soonest, such as lifting the 100MW cap,” said Steenhuisen, adding that Ramaphosa’s first act in his second term as ANC president – instead of announcing progress on any of these – was to deal yet another blow to Eskom by announcing that the utility would be moved from the Ministry of Public Enterprises to the Ministry of Energy, “under coal dinosaur” Gwede Mantashe,” he said.
“Nothing could better underscore the fact that while the ANC is in power, the electricity crisis is only going to get worse and worse. My advice to all households and businesses in South Africa, whether poor or rich, small or large, is to do everything you can to shield yourself from load shedding.”
Eskom was an extraction system that was plugged into SA’s energy system at every stage of the value chain and was sucking it dry.
“South Africans, you are on your own. If you look at the trend of load shedding over the past few years, it is clear that things are going to get a lot worse,” Steenhuisen said.
He said the number of days of load shedding a year had grown exponentially, from 141 hours (six days) in 2018 to 534 hours (22 days) in 2019 to 844 hours (35 days) in 2020 to 1153 hours (48 days) in 2021, to 3776 (157 days) in 2022. In 2023, it would get even worse.
“The electricity crisis is now the single biggest threat to South Africa’s well-being. It is doing profound economic and social harm.
“Last year, it cost South Africa R560 billion in lost productivity. This translated directly to more poverty, more unemployment, more inequality and more crime,” he said.
Pretoria News