South Africa will sig­ni­fic­antly increase pub­lic bor­row­ing.

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

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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