Johannesburg - Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has conceded that the ANC, as the ruling party, has not paid necessary attention to Eskom's problems, saying that the governing party "dropped the ball" when it came to the power utility.
South Africa has been plunged into rolling blackouts since 2008 because of the country’s poor energy infrastructure.
Godongwana was speaking at a Progressive Business Forum (PBF) event held on the sidelines of the party’s 55th national elective conference at Nasrec on Saturday morning.
While blaming the current administration, Godongwana said R230 billion has been spent on Eskom since the crisis, but has contributed 40% in SA’s economic under-performance.
"Without fear of contradiction, I want to say we've also dropped the ball because we focused more on fixing Eskom than on fixing power to the grid. There is a difference between the two. What is required is the focus on both," Godongwana said.
Delivering his political report at the conference, President Cyril Ramaphosa mirrored Godongwana’s assertions, blaming "state capture."
"The process to restructure Eskom into three separate state-owned entities responsible for generation, transmission, and distribution is at an advanced stage, creating the conditions for greater financial and operational efficiency.
"This will allow more diversity in the generation of electricity, reducing the risk of reliance on a single generator.
"While there may be diverse electricity generators and distributors, transmission must remain under the control of the people as it is a national security matter.
"The revitalisation of the renewable energy independent power producer programme has brought additional wind and solar power onto the grid, and significantly more generating capacity is due to come online in the next two rounds of the programme.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana speaking at ANC’s PBF breakfast conceded that government dropped the ball by concentrating in fixing @Eskom_SA than concentrating on power to the grid. “Between 2019 to day, we spent R230bn on Eskom” he said @TheStar_news @IOL #ANCNC55 pic.twitter.com/7FujjOOuvn
— Ntombi Nkosi (@nntombi_nkosi) December 17, 2022
"We expect more than 9 000 megawatts of new embedded generation capacity in the near future," said Ramaphosa.
The Star