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South Africa in state of disaster.

 South Africa has declared a national state of dis­aster over its worst spate of rolling black­outs, as the

SA flag

gov­ern­ment scrambles to remove obstacles to invest­ing in energy sup­ply out­side the broken Eskom power mono­poly. Eskom has had to cut off swaths of cus­tom­ers for up to 10 hours a day in recent months to pre­vent the accel­er­at­ing col­lapse of age­ing coal power plants, the main­stay of South Africa’s power net­work, turn­ing into a total grid break­down. As a res­ult, Ram­a­phosa’s gov­ern­ing African National Con­gress is facing the wrath of South Afric­ans in national elec­tions next year as factor­ies halt, crops wither without irrig­a­tion and food rots in refri­ger­at­ors. He prom­ised funds would not be abused under cover of the dis­aster, acknow­ledging pub­lic fury at cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment when South Africa declared sim­ilar emer­gency pro­vi­sions over the Covid-19 pan­demic.

South Africa’s main oppos­i­tion Demo­cratic Alli­ance said the state of dis­aster would «empower the ANC to abuse pro­cure­ment pro­cesses and issue non­sensical reg­u­la­tions that have noth­ing to do with the elec­tri­city crisis».

www.sba.tax

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