Eskom’s monopoly in South Africa is slowly ending
President Cyril Ramaphosa has delayed the restructuring of power utility Eskom, with a key step in establishing an independent state-owned transmission company pushed back a month.
The president announced that the Eskom Restructuring Task Team set up earlier this year would be given until 30 June to present a high-level report to the presidency.
This is after it missed its 30 May 2026 deadline.
The task team includes representatives of the Presidency, National Treasury, the Department of Electricity and Energy, Eskom, and the National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA).
It was established by Ramaphosa following his State of the Nation Address earlier this year to provide certainty after Eskom and Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa revealed plans to keep the national power utility’s monopoly intact.
In a statement in December, the utility said Ramokgopa had approved a “revised unbundling strategy” that would still split Eskom into distribution, generation, renewable energy and transmission units under a single holding company.
In this revised plan, Eskom would also retain ownership of the grid, rather than transferring it to an independent transmission system operator.
The statement contrasted with earlier plans to separate the company into three stand-alone units, as Ramaphosa proposed in 2019, to create a more competitive electricity market and make it easier to manage the divisions and their debt.
After widespread backlash, Ramaphosa made it clear in his SONA that a new independent transmission company (TSO) would be established, separate from Eskom’s NTCSA.
The TSO would have “ownership and control of transmission assets and be responsible for operating the electricity market,” Ramaphosa said.
The Eskom Restructuring Task Team was then established to develop a detailed proposal for implementing the plan to separate the TSO from Eskom and take control of the assets.
It was also tasked with considering the optimal institutional model for the TSO and addressing the measures required to ensure adequate independence of the NTCSA.
Critically, the task team needs to ensure that the TSO is fully independent, but also has to ensure that Eskom is not worse off than its current financial position.
One of the key arguments from Eskom and Ramokgopa for keeping the transmission assets with the national utility was its obligations to bondholders and the financial implications of losing them.
The TSO, meanwhile, has to be financially sustainable and must be able to raise the funding required for investment in infrastructure in line with the country’s Transmission Development Plan.
The task team was expected to present a high-level report by the end of May 2026, but missed this deadline.
The President has now extended this deadline to the end of June 2026, “in order to ensure that the proposed approach can be fully detailed and considered through the relevant governance structures”.
The high-level report is just the first phase of Ramaphosa’s plan.
The second phase includes developing a detailed implementation plan with timeframes for completing the restructuring as proposed.
The second phase is expected to be completed within three months of the first phase ending, putting the deadline around the end of September 2026.
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