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PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES MEASURES TO ADDRESS ENERGY CRISIS
- 09 February 2023
- State Owned Enterprises
- SA Legal Academy
This year’s State of the Nation Address included comprehensive plans for urgently addressing the energy crisis, beginning with the declaration of a national state of disaster. A notice confirming this was gazetted during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech in the National Assembly.
According to the President, the state of disaster will enable government to:
- introduce the ‘practical measures’ necessary to ‘support businesses in the food production, storage and retail supply chain’ by facilitating ‘the rollout of generators, solar panels and uninterrupted power supply’
- ‘exempt critical infrastructure such as hospitals and water treatment plants from load shedding’ where technically possible, and
- ‘accelerate energy projects’ and ‘limit regulatory requirements', nevertheless ‘maintaining rigorous environmental protections, procurement principles and technical standards’.
In addition:
- ‘the Auditor-General will be brought in to ensure (the) continuous monitoring of expenditure, in order to guard against any abuse of the funds needed to attend to this disaster’
- a Minister of Electricity in the Presidency will be appointed to:
- assume full responsibility for overseeing ‘all aspects of the electricity crisis response, including the work of the National Energy Crisis Committee’, and
- 'deal more effectively and urgently with the challenges’ implicit by working with the Eskom board and management on ‘ending load shedding and ensuring that the energy action plan is implemented without delay’.
This notwithstanding, the Minister of Public Enterprises will:
- ‘remain the shareholder representative of Eskom’
- ‘steer’ its restructuring
- ‘ensure the establishment of … (a) transmission company’
- ‘oversee the implementation of the just energy transition programme’, and
- ‘oversee the establishment of the … (state-owned) holding company’.
According to the President, ‘an effective response to this crisis involves several different departments and entities that require co-ordination from the centre of government’. With that in mind, government plans to involve its social partners in ‘an effective structure similar to the one … set up to drive the (Covid-19) vaccine rollout’.
- State of the Nation Address
- declaration of a national state of disaster
- classification of severe electricity supply constraints as a national disaster
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch