Success of Ramaphosa’s energy action plan hinges on effective implementation, say business and labour

“We need to work together to implement,” said Cas Coovadia, the CEO of Business Unity South Africa (Busa). He was responding to a question put to him by Business Maverick’s Ray Mahlaka on Thursday in a Daily Maverick webinar. Lebogang Mulaisi, the head of the Policy Unit at the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) shared similar sentiments. 

The trio was discussing President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recently announced “energy action plan” to end rolling blackouts and place South Africa on a trajectory towards sustainable energy security, and whether the plan went far enough, could do what it was pitched to do and what potential obstacles lay ahead.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ijRVm_Q3K0

Daily Maverick previously reported that Ramaphosa announced a set of actions to respond to South Africa’s yearslong energy crisis. The planned actions include improving the performance of Eskom’s fleet of power stations, increasing and accelerating the procurement of new generation capacity and increasing the participation of private actors in the electricity sector.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-07-26-here-it-is-ramaphosas-energy-action-plan-to-end-sas-rolling-blackouts/

Asked whether the plan goes far enough to address the energy crisis, Mulaisi said: “What I think the plan does and what it was meant to do was to address a crisis. And I think that’s just what it does. It’s helping us to kind of build the building blocks on how to address the current crises. 

“We know the ripple effect that load shedding has on our society is not good for a country that’s coming out of a post-pandemic recovery trajectory. It can’t be good for business, it can’t be good for growth, and if those things come together in a melting pot where there’s high poverty, high unemployment, high inequality, it’s just an implosion waiting to happen, so I think we can agree on the fact that it helps us to address the current challenges.” 

She added, however, that the plan had its shortcomings, notably the omission of the issue of Eskom’s roughly R396-billion debt.  

“We can bring in all the private sector participation that we want to bring into the system, Eskom still remains critical. It remains critical for expanding electricity, particularly to poor and indigent communities. So we need to keep that organisation intact.” 

Coovadia said that he and Busa were “guardedly optimistic” about the plan. He went on to say: “We think that the plan is a good one, we think that it begins to address the critical issues that need to be addressed to ensure that we have a more sustainable, cleaner, more effective and efficient energy infrastructure and architecture in our country. 

“And I agree that part of that has got to be Eskom. But we need to look at Eskom restructuring within the context of a role for Eskom, not the role for Eskom. The Eskom management itself is quite clear that we need a more diversified energy architecture and that Eskom has a critical role to play in that, but not the sort of monopolistic role which it has been playing up to now.”  

Cognisant of the country’s woeful history of policy implementation paralysis, Mahlaka asked the panellists about the potential challenge this may present in achieving the desired outcomes of the energy action plan and what had spurred the newfound urgency to tackle a power supply shortfall that at least three presidents have overseen.   

 Rolling blackouts