Business Day Live – SA FACES its worse power crisis in 40 years. Eskom has now admitted in Parliament that, after five years of electricity shortages, we are likely to face another five. A decade of power constraints will cripple aspirations to grow our economy.
We need to understand how this crisis emerged and how we can fix it; we need a commission of inquiry to consider deep-rooted power sector reforms.
The realisation that Eskom cannot fix the power crisis anytime soon is dawning slowly on the government. Eskom was seen as integral to the developmental state, and its mega coal power stations — Medupi and Kusile — were meant to power the economy into the future. However, we now know that these new power units are years late, way over budget, and are constraining rather than facilitating economic development.
