President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement on government interventions meant to tackle SA’s crippling energy crisis will be closely watched this week.
Ramaphosa is expected to address the nation on how government intends to keep the lights on. This follows weeks of power cuts with struggling power utility Eskom forced to implement stage 6 load-shedding for the first time since 2019, partly as a result of an unprotected strike that disrupted operations at various power stations across the country. During stage 6, Eskom sheds 6,000MW from the national grid and customers are without electricity for up to 10 hours a day.
Eskom’s financial and power generation woes have been described as the biggest single threat to the economy, and the latest power cuts will further hobble GDP growth that was already weak even before the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020.
Last week Business Unity SA (Busa) said some of the interventions urgently needed include removing caps on registering self-generation projects; establishing an emergency feed-in tariff framework to enable Eskom to buy power from existing generators; and urgently tackling sabotage at Eskom and the theft of copper cable.
The much anticipated and delayed KwaZulu-Natal ANC elective conference is scheduled to commence on Friday. Among the front-runners for the top position is chair and premier Sihle Zikalala. His colleague in government, finance MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube, has the support of the ANC Women’s League. Prominent businessman and former president Jacob Zuma ally Sandile Zungu also enjoys strong support.
KwaZulu-Natal is the ANC’s biggest region and the outcome of the conference could set the tone and potentially the outcome of the national elective conference scheduled for December in which Ramaphosa is widely expected to be re-elected for a second term.
On Tuesday, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) — the policymaking body made up of the government, business and labour — and think-tank the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection will host a webinar looking at lessons and legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two institutions note, for example, that at the beginning of the pandemic, it could be argued that the social contract between the people and government was high, with strong adherence to lockdown restrictions.
However, by the end of the pandemic, this was reversed with far fewer people agreeing to be vaccinated. This webinar will focus on what happened to the social contract looking at adherence to non-pharmaceutical measures, respect for lockdown regulations, and attitudes to vaccination.
Parliamentary hearings looking into public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s fitness to hold office continue on Monday with evidence from a subpoenaed witness. Mkhwebane’s fate hangs in the balance after a series of devastating court findings against her, which prompted the DA to call for an inquiry into her fitness to hold office.
Her time in office has been marked by controversy and accusations that she has involved her office in factional ANC battles, using it to defend those linked with Zuma. On the other hand, she was relentless in pursuing and making findings, later set aside in court, against President Cyril Ramaphosa over the campaign that won him the ANC presidency in 2017, and against public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan over a widely discredited claim that he started a “rogue unit” at the SA Revenue Service.
On Friday the home affairs committee will be going through an amended Electoral Amendment Bill, which has been prepared by parliamentary legal advisers and which incorporates all the amendments decided on by the committee. This is the final stage of processing the bill before it is submitted to the National Assembly for approval. The bill aims to allow independent candidates to contest national and provincial elections as required by a Constitutional Court judgment which ruled the Electoral Act unconstitutional because it did not allow for this.
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