Does SA have a future without power cuts?

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa, in his 2026 State of the Nation Address, announced that the country’s electricity transmission assets would move out of state-owned Eskom.

- ROD CROMPTON

This will happen once the newly established National Transmission Company of South Africa is unbundled into a fully independent company.

This is not the first time Ramaphosa has used his State of the Nation Address to keep South Africa's electricity reforms on track. In 2021, he raised the cap on private power generation from 1MW to 100MW. Minister Gwede Mantashe at the time admitted that the president had “twisted his arm’.

In 2022, Ramaphosa removed the cap altogether, unleashing a torrent of private investment.

Why did Ramaphosa need to intervene again in 2026?

Many would naturally expect a national electricity transmission company to have transmission assets. But for those who have followed South Africa's long, zigzag road toward market reforms since it became government policy in the white paper on Energy Policy in 1998, it is less of a surprise.

I was involved in drafting the white paper and the 2019 Eskom road map. I worked in the Department of Minerals and Energy, was a regulator at the National Energy Regulator of South Africa for 11 years and subsequently sat on the Eskom board for six years until I resigned in 2024.

If nothing else, Eskom management has a dogged determination in pursuit of their objectives. In this fight, where ideology and serious money are intertwined, it’s difficult to predict the outcome. It’s important because it’s a prelude to bigger fights to come.