Load-shedding our way to disaster

In February 2023, during his State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that he would appoint a minister of electricity to manage South Africa’s escalating power crisis. This was a surprise to South Africans and opposition parties alike: there were already two ministers responsible for electricity generation and transmission in the country, namely Pravin Gordhan, minister of state-owned enterprises, and Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral resources and energy.

On 6 March, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa was appointed by Ramaphosa as minister of the newly-established Ministry of Electricity. The aim of the ministry, according to Ramaphosa, was to exercise authority and control over the country’s Energy Action Plan, and to end load-shedding by 2024. While Ramokgopa was only appointed in March this year, his tenure as minister of electricity has already been somewhat controversial. He started off his tenure by visiting 14 of South Africa’s power stations in two weeks, which, according to Mantashe, was something no one had ever done before, while also declaring that South Africa’s energy crisis was the result of an ageing fleet, rather than corruption and theft. Both these events drew great criticism from society at large. The first because it was unclear what Ramokgopa would actually learn by simply visiting the power stations and the second because corruption is largely considered the major contributor to South Africa’s energy problems.

Since last week, South Africa has been experiencing Stage 6 loadshedding. According to the power utility Eskom, this will continue indefinitely. Some media outlets also reported that over the past week we have actually been suffering under Stage 8 load-shedding, which wasn’t announced by Eskom. When asked about this, Ramokgopa said that he wasn’t aware that there was Stage 8 load-shedding.

As mentioned before, load-shedding has a dire impact on businesses. This includes farmers. There are no set numbers available as yet, particularly as load-shedding is an ongoing problem, but I don’t think it’s far-fetched that load-shedding has cost the primary and secondary agriculture sector billions of rands. We will only see the true impact of this in months to come, but South Africa’s skyrocketing food prices amidst softening global and commodity prices suggests that the effects of load-shedding are beginning to manifest.

This brings me back to Ramokgopa: what is his role in government? What are his key performance indicators? How will Ramaphosa determine if he is making an actual (positive) difference to our electricity crisis?

The fact that we are now teetering on the brink of higher than Stage 6 load-shedding stages may indicate that Ramokgopa’s influence in this space has been less than ideal. Indeed, the argument can be made that we need less government influence in the failed power utility, and that the private sector should be allowed to take the necessary control for the sake of the country’s floundering economy.