Spare us the empty promises and do something
The cities of Cape Town and Tshwane say that president Cyril Ramaphosa needs to lay out a tangible plan to end load shedding and address the many crises hitting the country at present.
The president is set to deliver his seventh State of the Nation Address on Thursday evening at 19h00, where businesses, investors, lawmakers and South Africans at large will be waiting for him to deal with the elephant in the room.
The ongoing power crisis, which has seen the country subjected to load shedding for 15 years – and more recently, non-stop rolling blackouts for over 100 consecutive days – is causing widespread destruction in the country.
This is the destruction of both the economic kind – wiping as much as R1 billion from the economy every day – and also of the lives and livelihoods of millions of South Africans that have to suffer the consequences of failing infrastructure, rising prices, and growing risks of food insecurity.
Political parties and civil action groups said that SONA 2023 is unlikely to inspire much hope, noting that previous addresses from the president over the last six years have been filled with empty promises and little to show for it.
The speech typically features a laundry list of boxes to tick, including promising to address crime and violence, the energy crisis, inequality and providing “a better life for all”.
Investors and broader markets are also wary of the address. According to market analysts, the SONA rarely has any significant impact on market movements – however, in the lead-up to 2023’s address, the rand has weakened significantly, indicating a flurry of negative sentiment towards the speech and the likelihood that Ramaphosa will not be able to deliver any actionable solutions.
“The SONA itself is not expected to deliver any market-moving news, with SA’s multiple crises unlikely to see quick resolution,” said Investec chief economist Annabel Bishop. “Investor appetite has consequently waned, negatively affecting the rand and SA’s portfolio assets.”
Time for action
The City of Tshwane said that the time for talk is over, however, and that a tangible plan to deal with the country’s problems needs to be put in place.
“As a large metropolitan municipality, load-shedding is severely hampering our ability to supply electricity reliably to our residents. Our municipal electricity infrastructure was never designed for load-shedding, and therefore, continuously switching the network on and off has a major damaging impact on the infrastructure.
“Our maintenance and repair costs have skyrocketed as we have to prioritise continuously responding to faults and breakdowns due to load-shedding,” it said.
Higher levels of load-shedding also affect the city’s ability to consistently supply water to all residents, it said, adding that outages put serious pressure on the water supply network, affecting both the City of Tshwane network and Rand Water’s bulk supply systems.
“If Rand Water is unable to pump water to Gauteng municipalities, this can lead to shortages across the province. This is just one of the many knock-on effects that load-shedding has on hampering core services.”
The city said that 2023 has just started, and already the country has experienced some of the highest levels of load-shedding in history.
“It is likely that load-shedding will have its most devastating impact on the economy this year. We simply cannot go on like this. The Presidency must take responsibility and ensure that it focuses on ending load-shedding, which continues to cripple the economy.”
The City of Cape Town went a step further. In an open letter to Ramaphosa, the city’s mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, provided actionable solutions to not only assist with rolling blackouts but also many other crises faced by the national government.
Broadly, the solution is to devolve national competencies to allow well-functioning cities to do what the state cannot.
“(Ramaphosa has) the power to announce the changes needed to devolve more powers to well-run local authorities,” Hill-Lewis said.
“We believe it is particularly urgent to incentivise energy generation by households and businesses; devolve more policing powers for municipal law enforcement to help SAPS fight crime; and to get our trains running again by devolving passenger rail to the City of Cape Town.”
Cape Town has already moved a step ahead of the rest of the country through its localised energy measures, often protecting residents from one or two stages of load shedding. The city aims to increase this protection to four stages over the medium term and to eliminate the threat of load shedding altogether over time.
It has also become the forerunner in feed-in programmes, having recently announced its plans to buy extra power from private producers from the middle of the year.
However, it needs the national government to play its part.
“We need the national government’s support for households and businesses to rapidly scale up solar power generation. (This includes) tax rebate incentives to go solar while staying on the grid to sell power for cash, (and) a national solar PV subsidy for local authorities to rapidly install small-scale embedded generation at public buildings and rental stock,” the mayor said.
“We believe these simple, immediate measures can make a massive, positive impact in the daily lives of citizens. Making these changes is about people, not politics. Use your State of the Nation address to turn the tide on state failure and give South Africans a sense of renewed hope for the future.”
The feedback from South Africa’s biggest cities echoes sentiments from the country’s business community. In an open letter to the president this week, business leaders from some of the biggest companies in the country also said that it was time for action.
They acknowledged that Ramaphosa had already laid out a roadmap to resolving the energy crisis and that plans were in place and processes underway – however, they implored that rapid action is taken.
This includes fulfilling promises from the 2022 address, where the president promised to cut red tape and fast-track measures to deal with the energy shortfall. Neither of these promises have been fully realised.
“If this crisis continues, we will not be able to guarantee stable supplies of food, medicines and other essential goods. The government needs to understand this, rather than believe we can maintain business as usual,” they said.
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