Political interference nearly crippled South Africa's energy landscape

AS SOUTH Africa marks a decade of wind energy generation under the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), it must also reckon with a period when political interference nearly brought that progress to a halt. At the centre of that disruption stands former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe.

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Molefe's refusal to sign key renewable energy agreements delayed investment, deepened load shedding, and destabilised the sector. The resulting uncertainty cost the country billions and led to significant job losses, consequences that are still felt in the energy landscape today.

Molefe was appointed CEO of Eskom in 2015, after a tenure at Transnet that would later come under scrutiny for enabling large-scale procurement irregularities. In August of that year, he and then-President Jacob Zuma celebrated the first unit of the Medupi coal-fired power station reaching commercial operation. The event was presented as a turning point. Zuma announced that load shedding was over, and the energy crisis resolved.

That statement was not only premature, it was deliberately misleading. Medupi had already been delayed by four years and had exceeded its original budget by tens of billions of rand. The final unit would only come online in 2021. These delays placed immense pressure on older coal-fired power stations that needed scheduled maintenance. Without this planned downtime, system stability declined. Load shedding remained a necessary and increasingly frequent tool to prevent system collapse.

Rather than use this milestone to support a balanced and diversified electricity mix, Molefe used it to justify delaying the signing of REIPPPP Bid Window 4 power purchase agreements. His reasons ranged from the claim that Medupi's output would suffice, to arguments about the tariffs being too high. Behind these justifications was a clear agenda: stall the growth of private-sector-led renewable energy.