Government

5 important things happening in South Africa today

Staff Writer

 ·30 May 2022

Here’s what is happening in and affecting South Africa today:

• Petrol price intervention: Government is expected to step in to further intervene on the country’s petrol price after officials from the National Treasury and Department of Energy met this weekend. An announcement is expected to be made sometime this week, says finance minister Enoch Godongwana. [BusinessDay]

• R25/litre from this week: Economist Dawie Roodt has warned that without intervention, South Africans will be paying more than R25/litre for petrol this week – with the expected R4/litre the country’s biggest increase ever. Roodt said that one possible way to get around these record petrol prices going forward is to ‘deregulate’ the petrol price which would allow individual petrol stations to se their own price. [eNCA].

• Free land: Flood victims in KwaZulu-Natal and other impacted areas should be given land not prone to disasters, says Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. The minister said that the impact of climate change will effectively split South Africa into two, the eastern part will be wetter with more frequent floods while the western part will be drier with frequent droughts. [EWN]

• Load shedding crisis: Just three power stations – Tutuka, Kendal and Duvha – accounted for nearly half, of all Eskom plant breakdowns in the year to March 2022. If Eskom was to fix these broken power stations and restore just half of these amounts offline, this would be enough to plug the shortfall that Eskom currently has during the evening peak. [Moneyweb]

• Markets: The dollar had its biggest weekly drop in nearly four months as traders lowered Federal Reserve rate hike expectations amid signs the US central bank might slow or even pause its tightening cycle in the second half of the year. The rand is currently trading at R15.57/$, R16.75/€ and R19.68/£.