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Cyril Ramaphosa hurries home to guide action plan for country’s crippling power crisis

Cyril Ramaphosa hurries home to guide action plan for country’s crippling power crisis
Queenin Masuabi
By Queenin Masuabi
20 Sep 2022
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President Cyril Ramaphosa and his cabinet will meet to follow up on the short-term plans that were formulated after the previous time citizens were hit with power cuts. The country has yet again been experiencing scheduled outages as Eskom continues to encounter breakdowns at its stations.

Upon his return to South Africa on Tuesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa will convene meetings with ministers and members of the newly established National Energy Crisis Committee to tackle the rolling blackouts in the country. The power crisis will also be top of the agenda when Cabinet meets as scheduled on Wednesday.

Speaking to Daily Maverick, presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said president Cyril Ramaphosa had already held a virtual emergency meeting on Sunday with a number of ministers to talk about how to solve the recurring energy crisis. Present in the meeting were members of the National Energy Crisis Committee as well as ministers responsible for overseeing the structure who are part of the inter-ministerial committee. 

The National Energy Crisis Committee was formed last month after the previous bout of rolling blackouts in July. At the time, Ramaphosa assured citizens that the government would be implementing short and long-term plans to end rolling blackouts. The short-term plans include improving the performance of Eskom’s existing power stations and adding as much new generation capacity to the grid as quickly as possible. 




“For now, the President is going to be convening meetings with concerned Public Enterprises Minister [Pravin Gordhan], Mineral Resources and Energy Minister [Gwede Mantashe], Finance Minister [Enoch Godongwana], Environment, Forest and Fisheries [Barbara Creecy] as well as the officials, including the Director General in the Presidency [Phindile Baleni] who chairs the Energy crisis committee. So he held one emergency meeting with them on Sunday, he’s waiting for more updates and will certainly convene more meetings upon his return,” according to Magwenya. 



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The President cut his international travels short so that he could return to the country and deal with the Eskom crisis. Ramaphosa met US President Joe Biden on Friday, 16 September, then flew to London ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday, 19 September.

He was scheduled to return to New York after the funeral to attend this week’s high-level opening segment of the annual United Nations General Assembly session. But Magwenya announced on Sunday evening that Ramaphosa had changed his plans.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “The less obvious impact of Eskom’s power cuts on our lives”. 

Magwenya explained that discussions around finding solutions for the current state of affairs would be prioritised in the next cabinet meeting.

“There is a cabinet meeting [on Wednesday] the President will chair and that Eskom and the energy situation will be on top of the agenda,” Magwenya said. 



Residents and businesses have suffered long hours without electricity amid stepped-up rolling blackouts. Eskom placed the country on different stages since last week with the power utility moving to stage 6 by Sunday, which saw South Africans eperiencing six hours of blackouts per day — sometimes more. 



In his weekly presidential newsletter issued on Tuesday morning, 20 September 2022, Ramaphsoa said the country acknowledged the urgency to overcome the electricity crisis.

“Since late last week, Eskom has been forced to implement load shedding due to breakdowns at a number of power stations. The situation has been made worse by the depletion of emergency generation reserves such as pumped storage and diesel turbines and the need for these to be replenished. The severe load shedding of the last few days has reminded us how unstable our ageing power stations are. It has given greater urgency to the measures we announced two months ago to stabilise our electricity supply,” the letter reads.

On Sunday, during a press briefing, Eskom group chief executive André de Ruyter said they would start to procure additional energy from existing independent power producers. The plan is to access approximately 1,000MW from existing independent power producers like Sasol and Sappi and hopes to have it online within a week or two.

De Ruyter also emphasised that rolling blackouts would continue throughout this week. DM

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