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South Africa’s ever-worsening power crisis — in which homes and businesses go without electricity for up to 10 hours per day — is strangling Africa’s most developed economy.
President Cyril Ramaphosa hopes that his new Electricity Minister Kgosientso Ramokgopa will help his government to curb the rampant corruption and mismanagement that have put the country in the dark. Ramaphosa made the appointment in a long-awaited Cabinet reshuffle on March 6.
The new minister will focus solely on dealing with the crippling power cuts, Ramaphosa said in his State of the Nation address in February, when he declared a state of disaster to deal with the electricity shortages affecting the country’s 60 million people.
South Africa’s state-owned power utility Eskom has implemented rolling power cuts across the nation for years but 2022 was the worst and 2023 has started with even longer outages and no solution in sight.
As a result of the extensive power cuts, South Africa’s central bank now forecasts GDP growth to be just 0.3% in 2023.
Eskom, which marks its 100th anniversary in March, is struggling with the frequent breakdowns of many of its aging coal-fired power stations. The biggest problem is corruption in which at least four gangs are draining the company of $50 million per month, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said recently. His scathing indictment in a television interview of the government’s inability to curb the corruption led to his immediate resignation.
The power cuts are the biggest threat to South Africa’s economy, said Mark Swilling, co-director of the Centre for Sustainability Transitions at Stellenbosch University.
South Africa’s economy is in decline due to the wide-ranging effects that the power crisis was having on businesses, he said.
“The combination of rising interest rates and load-shedding is simply making things worse, so our economy is indeed in decline,” Swilling told The Associated Press.
The naming of a new electricity minister is a positive step, said Swilling. “It is encouraging that the president will now have someone to focus specifically on dealing with the crisis, and people will expect to see actual results,” he said.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.