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South Africa will sig­ni­fic­antly increase pub­lic bor­row­ing.

 South Africa will sig­ni­fic­antly increase pub­lic bor­row­ing to relieve two-thirds of Eskom’s debts as the

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strug­gling state elec­tri­city mono­poly imposes the worst rolling black­outs yet in Africa’s most indus­tri­al­ised nation.

South Africa and the debt relief would enable Eskom to spend more money on main­tain­ing mal­func­tion­ing power sta­tions at the core of the crisis, said fin­ance min­is­ter Enoch Godong­wana, as he delivered the annual budget.

Eskom would have to meet «strict con­di­tions» on bet­ter power sta­tion per­form­ance to access the relief, he added. Most of Eskom’s debt was already issued under gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee.

Eskom this week hit a record for break­downs at age­ing coal plants that provide the bulk of South Africa’s power. Many ana­lysts and busi­nesspeople regard the plants as increas­ingly irre­par­able, given enorm­ous cor­rup­tion in Eskom under the rul­ing African National Con­gress.

The power cuts reached an unpre­ced­en­ted 7,000 mega­watts on Tues­day even­ing, nearly a quarter of the coun­try’s elec­tri­city demand and sur­pass­ing pre­vi­ous out­ages of about 6,000MW, accord­ing to Eskom fig­ures.

Ram­a­phosa has already declared a state of dis­aster over the rolling cuts, which are designed to stave off a total col­lapse of elec­tri­city sup­ply and leave house­holds and busi­nesses without power for up to 12 hours a day, inter­rupt­ing everything from crop irrig­a­tion and min­ing to ice-cream shop freez­ers.

The escal­a­tion of «load shed­ding» this week sig­nals how rap­idly Eskom’s power plants are col­lapsing des­pite the gov­ern­ment’s race to fix the util­ity’s fin­ances and approve private power projects to secure more power.

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Comments

  1. Adam Barnes23 February 2023 at 10:19

    This is what happens when companies and officials are corrupt. Corruption can bring a country to its knees.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Peter23 February 2023 at 10:46

      Nothing will be fixed until they start leaving coal plants behind. They can't be repaired and are a thing of the past nowadays. They should only be kept alive while other power plants are being built.

      Delete
  2. Tom23 February 2023 at 11:23

    If Ramaphosa is not corrupt himself then he needs to start charging people who are corrupt. They need to see that this is not ok. Otherwise this will just go on and on. This crisis might pass but others will come if corruption continues.

    ReplyDelete

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