As Eskom ramped up load-shedding and said disruptions would last at least for the rest of the week, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that rolling power cuts had hurt the ANC in the polls, leading to its worst election performance yet.
Ramaphosa cited the outages, dismal municipal service delivery, corruption and patronage among factors that caused ANC voters to either stay at home or choose other parties. He was addressing supporters at an event in Soweto.
The party’s national executive committee, the highest decision-making body between conferences, met at the weekend to digest its disastrous showing in local elections last week and to consider its options for potential coalitions.
His comments came as Eskom, which provides almost all of SA’s electricity, informed frustrated households and businesses that rolling power cuts would go into a third week. And it ramped up the intensity, saying it would implement stage 4, meaning the removal of 4,000MW until Friday. On Saturday, load-shedding will be downgraded to level 2.
It placed the blame on its generation capacity shortages and on reduced power coming from Zambia.
The utility, which survives on government bailouts, has been cited by economists and ratings companies as one of the biggest risks to the economy.
Its debt load is mostly guaranteed by the state.
While Ramaphosa admitted to significant political costs and risks to the economy from the failure to deal with the unreliability of supply, he offered no new solutions. The president, who as far back as 2015, when he was deputy to Jacob Zuma, was assigned to lead a war room tasked with designing a turnaround strategy for the utility, said Eskom’s failure to provide a reliable energy supply is one of the things that keep him awake at night.
The power crisis cast a shadow over the ANC’s campaign in the days ahead of the November 1 elections, leading to the party suffering its worst electoral outcome in 27 years. It was already facing an uphill task, with voters disillusioned by dysfunctional municipalities that fail to provide the most basic services.
Falling short of placing a timeframe of when the power crisis, which has plagued the country for the past 14 years, would end, Ramaphosa said the restructuring of the power utility into different units and introducing competition is central to easing the electricity shortages.
"[We] need to restructure it [Eskom] in a way that would enable us to have generation but that generation should purchase electricity generated from others. The state should continue to own the transmission because that is the pipeline that belongs to the people of SA ... But we do want to have a measure of competition so that when there are breakdowns then there are others that are able to maintain [the supply]," he said on Monday.
The outcome of the election left the ANC set to retain just 161 out of 213 municipal councils, with its share of the vote nationally dropping to below 50% for the first time. With 66 hung municipalities where no party won an outright majority, the stage is set for frantic negotiations to form coalitions.
Political parties have 14 days from Monday to iron out coalition agreements and form councils. If this does not happen, “legislation would kick in ... and a rerun of elections in those hung municipalities could be forced”, Ramaphosa said.
He said that despite the ANC’s electoral losses, the party will not enter into coalition talks with other parties from a desperate position, referring to the DA, ActionSA, and GOOD, which have said they will not enter into coalition talks with the ANC. Both the ANC and the DA failed to win enough votes to easily form stable governments in the key Gauteng metros of Tshwane and Johannesburg.
“I have been hearing parties saying they will not go into coalition with the ANC and that made me wonder, ‘who said the ANC wants to get into partnerships with them?’" he said.
If negotiations fail, the ANC would sit on the opposition benches, Ramaphosa said.
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