Johannesburg - South Africa was “ahead of the curve” in addressing its electricity supply crisis, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa said yesterday.
Answering questions in the National Council of Provinces, Ramaphosa said many countries faced similar problems with energy supply because they had ageing power stations, but South Africa was in the fortunate position that it had started building new ones.
Critics of the government’s response to the electricity crisis have pointed out that the need for new power-generation capacity was first identified in a 1998 white paper on energy – advice that was ignored at the time – and that construction of the Medupi, Kusile and Ingula power stations has overshot the targets by as much as five years.
The bringing to commercial operation of the first unit of Medupi was an important milestone, and in 18 months to two years the country would forget there had been load shedding, Ramaphosa said.
The three state-owned enterprises he had been asked to take under his wing – Eskom, SAA and the South African Post Office – operated in challenging environments, exacerbated by the faltering global economy.
A business model was being developed to address the problem, Ramaphosa said.
There were more than 700 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and most were stable and “doing an excellent job”.
SOEs should not be written off because of the problems with three of them, Ramaphosa said.
“Have respect for our state-owned enterprises, please.”
He said an interministerial committee was considering the report of the presidential review commission on SOEs established by President Jacob Zuma, and when the committee finalised its report, there would be “light at the end of the tunnel”.
It was considering models of governance, operations and finances.
THE STAR