The acute electrical situation facing South Africa, including protracted daily power shortages, has prompted President Cyril Ramaphosa to proclaim a state of calamity with immediate effect. When faced with extraordinary problems, extraordinary solutions are required. Ramaphosa warned that the country’s energy crisis posed a “existential threat” to the country’s economic and social fabric during his State of the Nation speech on Thursday night.
A state of emergency has been declared as up to eight hours of daily rolling power outages affect homes, industries, and companies in the 60 million-person nation. The declaration of a state of disaster is an extreme step taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the devastating floods that took the lives of over 400 people in 2017. The announcement, as explained by Ramaphosa, will allow his administration to buy emergency electricity from neighboring nations and exempt important services like hospitals and water treatment facilities from outages. With this funding, the government may provide resources to help businesses adapt to power outages, such as increasing access to diesel generators and solar panels. Eskom, the country’s electricity company, is unable to meet demand owing to ageing coal-fired power station outages and years of corruption. Ramaphosa said that he will appoint a “energy minister” whose primary responsibility will be to resolve the country’s current power outage.
Parliamentary members from the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters opposition party disrupted Ramaphosa’s address for 45 minutes until they were removed by security. After the departure of Vice President David Mabuza and leadership changes within the African National Congress party, he would likely reorganize his government. Ramaphosa is widely anticipated to replace Mabuza with Paul Mashatile, the freshly elected vice president of the ANC.
