THE BLACK Business Council (BBC) has pleaded with the ANC NEC ahead of the party’s 55th national elective conference set for Nasrec this weekend to prioritise dealing with the Eskom crisis.
In a statement issued on Monday, the BBC decried the impact of load shedding on the country’s economy and expressed hopes of creating jobs.
The council said this is an important issue if the country is to win its fight against unemployment, which is still very high at over 34%.
The council said it has been over two months of uninterrupted daily blackouts, and this is unacceptable.
“These blackouts continue to erode the confidence of businesses and investors in South Africa, and the economic reconstruction and recovery plan won’t be achieved,” the BBC said.
This is because the country has been plunged into stages 6 and 5 of rolling blackouts since last week. On Saturday, the power utility announced that it will be enforcing Stage 5 load shedding due to unusually high demand and the breakdown of a generating unit at each of the Hendrina, Kendal, and Kriel power stations.
The BBC added that it had hoped that President Cyril Ramaphosa would have solved the issue after promising to do so during his address to the country on July 25, 2022.
Ramaphosa announced measures to address the Eskom crisis, which included the introduction of IPPs into the energy mix.
The council said at the time that it supported some of the measures announced by the president.
“Five months down the line, things have gotten worse instead of improving and this can only be attributed to the incompetent management which is promoting wind and solar energy instead of fixing Eskom. The BBC believes the dramatic decline in the reliability of the Eskom power system, which in the past three years has plunged the country into the worst energy crisis, must not be allowed to continue,” it said.
According to the Bureau for Economic Research's (BER) estimate, Eskom “technically” implemented Stage 7 load shedding at one point last week.
The BER argues Eskom’s power cuts reached this level after accounting for load curtailments against specific business users.
BER said load curtailment is a mechanism through which Eskom asks some of its most demanding power users to reduce their electricity consumption in periods of low electricity availability.
Last week, the energy minister and a member of the ANC NEC said the power crisis has the potential to plunge the country into total chaos and the overthrow of the state.
He said the current power crisis at Eskom was worse than state capture. The energy minister was speaking at a signing ceremony with independent power producers on Thursday. “We are from the period of state capture, but load shedding is becoming worse than state capture,” he said.