WATCH: South African President Declares ‘National State of Disaster’ on Electricity Crisis

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa used his annual “State of the Nation” address to Parliament on Thursday evening to declare a “national state of disaster” regarding the country’s ongoing electricity shortages.

The country’s state-owned power company, Eskom, provided the cheapest power in the world as recently as two decades ago, exporting electricity to neighboring African countries as South Africa enjoyed a surplus of power.

However, the company failed to plan adequately for future economic growth. It also implemented aggressive affirmative action policies that saw experienced engineers replaced with less qualified ones on the basis of race.

The company was also used to provide jobs to ruling party cronies, and corrupt businessmen siphoned money from the company by obtaining exorbitant procurement contracts, many of which were never fulfilled.

Moreover, critical power infrastructure has been targeted by thieves for theft and even deliberate sabotage.

As a result, the company has been forced to implement a policy of “load-shedding,” which rotates power outages throughout the country for several hours a day. Recent days have seen particularly intense shortages.

 

As Ramaphosa explained during his address, the “state of disaster” will allow the government to speed up the procurement of alternative power supplies, and will exempt key national infrastructure from load shedding:

The National Disaster Management Centre has consequently classified the energy crisis and its impact as a disaster.

We are therefore declaring a national state of disaster to respond to the electricity crisis and its effects.

The Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs has just gazetted the declaration of the State of Disaster, which will begin with immediate effect.

The state of disaster will enable us to provide practical measures that we need to take to support businesses in the food production, storage and retail supply chain, including for the rollout of generators, solar panels and uninterrupted power supply.

Where technically possible, it will enable us to exempt critical infrastructure such as hospitals and water treatment plants from load shedding.

And it will enable us to accelerate energy projects and limit regulatory requirements while maintaining rigorous environmental protections, procurement principles and technical standards.

The Auditor-General will be brought in to ensure continuous monitoring of expenditure, in order to guard against any abuses of the funds needed to attend to this disaster.

To deal more effectively and urgently with the challenges that confront us, I will appoint a Minister of Electricity in the Presidency to assume full responsibility for overseeing all aspects of the electricity crisis response, including the work of the National Energy Crisis Committee.

The Minister will focus full-time and work with the Eskom board and management on ending load shedding and ensuring that the Energy Action Plan is implemented without delay.

The “disaster” is already real. Those who can afford alternative energy sources — such as generators, batteries, and solar panels — are able to manage the crisis. For poor South Africans, however, load shedding means living without electricity for hours or even days on end.

That means students struggle to study and food spoils in refrigerators; it also means darkened streets are even more unsafe.

Often, when power is restored, the subsequent surge of electricity causes damage to consumer electronics, creating even more misery.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.