Ramaphosa checks off his big wins

The Presidency has published an update on the progress made by Operation Vulindlela – president Cyril Ramaphosa’s reform initiative in partnership with National Treasury – checking off 37% of his promised reforms as completed, with a further 37% on track.

According to the presidency, 13 of 35 promised reforms have been completed – 11 of which require no further work. Two reforms are completed but require further work to maintain.

In addition to this, seven reforms are on track, and six more are off track, but work is being done to accelerate progress.

On the more negative side, about eight reforms are facing significant challenges that require intervention, and one has not yet started. But positively, no reforms are classified as unlikely to be achieved at this stage.

According to the presidency, the biggest challenges are fundamentals in infrastructure, where the electricity, logistics and water and sanitation reforms are proving difficult to implement. However, despite the difficulty, they are all likely to be completed.

This is especially true in the electricity sector, where there has been slow improvement.

While the government has been pushing the Energy Action Plan through the National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom) – and some progress has been seen – things have been proceeding slower than planned.

For example, the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy has finally tabled the Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill to Parliament – but this comes after a massive delay. The plan to push Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor to over 70% has also been slow, with the utility currently still below 60%.

However, the presidency noted that EAF is up from 49% at the start of the year and that load shedding has been eased.

“The newly appointed Eskom board has set a target of reaching an EAF of 65% in the current financial year. Based on current progress, we have revised our assessment from red, indicating that a reform is facing critical challenges and is unlikely to be realised, to orange, indicating that the reform faces critical challenges that require intervention for the target to be reached,” it said.

Other milestones met in Q2 2023 were achieved in the electricity sector. Six projects from Bid Window 5 have reached financial close to date, with a further four expected to close by the end of August 2023 and
three to close by the end of September 2023.

It also marked progress in releasing interim grid capacity allocation rules, accelerating procurement of new generation capacity, advancing Just Energy Transition projects, progressing with the unbundling of Eskom, launching a demand management programme, increasing the pipeline of private sector generation projects and launching a campaign to reduce demand by 1,000MW in the next six months.

Looking ahead, the presidency said that it will be focusing on the following reforms:

• Releasing further bid windows for renewable energy – including 5GW of wind and solar, 1.2GW of battery storage and 3GW of gas.
• Removing more red tape for energy projects, including measures to accelerate solar, wind and battery storage, as well as transmission infrastructure.
• Operationalise the new Eskom transmission company
• Strengthen the capacity of the grid
• Procure 1,750MW of energy from cross-border purchases and the load shedding reduction programme.

Among the other reforms, the presidency checked off some “big wins”, including:

• The gazetting of the final date for analogue switch-off (ASO) on 15 June 2023, enabling
  analogue transmission to be switched off for all frequencies above 694 Megahertz
  (MHz) on 31 July 2023. The important implication of this is that all the broadband
  spectrum auctioned in March 2022 can now be entirely utilised by local mobile
  operators.

• Priority reforms to the visa system were completed. This had enabled the publica􀆟on
  of an implementation plan for planned immigration changes, which the Department of
  Home Affairs (DHA) will gazette soon for public comment. The DHA is also expanding
  its visa waiver programme to additional countries.

• A Bill which seeks to establish an agency to manage national bulk water resource
  infrastructure and attract investment is expected to soon be tabled in Parliament.

• The selection of an international terminal operator to partner with Transnet at the
  Durban Pier 2 container terminal. In addition, the National Logistics Crisis Committee
  (NLCC) was established to oversee implementation of the Freight Logistics Roadmap.
  The roadmap strives to resolve immediate operational challenges, while also
  developing interventions to fundamentally restructure the SA logistics sector. As has
  been widely reported, the sector is increasingly plagued by inefficiencies. A weekend
  report (see here) suggests that the NLCC has already facilitated a more open
  discussion between government, Transnet and the business sector about these issues.

Read: South Africa’s visa chaos deepens