Ramaphosa sees second Eskom as solution to power crisis

South Africa is considering creating a second state-owned power company to compete with Eskom, reducing the risk of having a single entity supplying most of the nation’s power supply, President Cyril Ramaphosa said.

“If we look at other countries like China, it has a number of state-owned electricity generating companies that compete amongst themselves to bring prices down,” Ramaphosa said in a speech to a meeting of the South African Communist Party on Friday. “That is a future that we should begin to imagine.”

The nation’s energy supply has been patchy since 2005, with Eskom, struggling to keep pace with demand. Frequent outages have caused the economy to underperform by 40%, finance minister Enoch Godongwana said on Thursday. Its high-debt burden has also been a strain on the nation’s coffers.  — S’thembile Cele, (c) 2022 Bloomberg LP