Eskom’s decline is a burning issue among ANC delegates as the party’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, delivered his political report on Friday, the first day of the ANC’s 55th elective conference at Nasrec.
Ramaphosa began his address amid boisterous chanting from the floor. As he prepared to take the podium, delegates chanted “load-shedding”.
When the president addressed Eskom’s woes later in his speech, his words competed with the resurgence of chanting. “The effects of load-shedding are felt every day by households, businesses, schools, hospitals and government offices,” Ramaphosa acknowledged.
“Load-shedding severely constrains economic growth and transformation, job creation, poverty alleviation and development,” the embattled president said.
Two days before the highly anticipated conference, André de Ruyter resigned as Eskom’s chief executive, while the country grappled with another severe bout of stage six rolling blackouts. The ANC is holding its elective conference more than 15 years into the country’s energy crisis, which has hamstrung the ailing economy.
Ramaphosa, however, said he believed there were better days ahead, as the government’s structural reforms aimed at unlocking new energy infrastructure started to show greenshoots.
“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,” the president noted.
“We expect more than 9 000 megawatts of new embedded generation capacity in the near future. This is taking place alongside concerted efforts to improve the performance of Eskom’s existing power plants.”
Ramaphosa noted that many South Africans were feeling the pinch of the rising cost of living, saying these conditions created a sense of hopelessness.
Poverty, unemployment and inequality are “the biggest stain on the development of our people”, Ramaphosa noted, adding: “It is still unacceptable that around half of our people live in poverty and about a quarter live below the poverty line.”
Recent data from Statistics South Africa shows that the unemployment rate has started to retreat from the record highs recorded in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw more than two million people lose their jobs.
However, according to the latest statistics, the expanded unemployment rate — which also counts those who have given up on the job search — was still north of 40%.
Meanwhile, the economy has also seemingly taken a more positive turn, after the GDP grew by a better-than-expected 1.6% in the third quarter of this year.
In his weekly letter earlier this week, Ramaphosa cited the jobs and GDP data to say: “The recovery of our economy and society is underway.” He echoed this sentiment on Friday. But analysts are less optimistic about the country’s economic prospects, as ongoing high stages of load-shedding threatens to continue stifling growth.
Economic transformation, Ramaphosa said, requires an economy that is growing and creating employment.
However, for much of the decade leading up to the ANC’s previous conference in 2017, the economy was characterised by low growth and high levels of unemployment, he added.
Since then, the president noted, the economy has suffered consecutive blows, including the Covid-19 pandemic, widespread unrest in July and, most recently, soaring inflation triggered by Russia’s war-related supply constraints. These knocks, he suggested, have set back the government’s economic reforms.
“The task of this 55th national conference,” Ramaphosa said, “is to agree on the necessary measures to ensure not only that the economy recovers faster … It is the ANC’s responsibility to ensure that the economy does not simply return to where it was before the pandemic, but that it is more inclusive, more diverse and that it is better able to provide employment and economic opportunities to the millions of people who remain marginalised”.
