South Africa’s ruling ANC wants to use disaster legislation to tackle power crisis

Johannesburg: South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) is looking at using disaster management legislation that was used to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic to help end its crippling power crisis, a top party official said on Tuesday.

State power utility Eskom has scheduled power cuts every day this year, after a record number of days with outages last year. On Tuesday, it will ramp up power cuts to the highest level on record.

“Our response to Covid-19 was scientifically driven. Our response to dealing with load-shedding must be scientifically driven,” ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula told the media. “The ANC … must declare a ‘state of disaster’ so that government can do extraordinary interventions beyond the regulatory environment… to pull together as we have done during Covid-19 and the 2010 (Soccer) World Cup,” he said.

Soon after the ANC’s National Executive Committee met to discuss the power crisis, Mbalula said that party leaders also wanted an energy crisis committee advising President Cyril Ramaphosa to speed up work to ensure there were no power cuts by the end of the year.

Earlier in January, the South African President cancelled a planned appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos and is expected to unveil a slew of new measures to boost power supply at a state of the nation address on February 9.

The power outages by Eskom have significantly constrained economic growth in Africa’s most industrialised nation, prompting the central bank last week to slash its growth forecasts for this year and next.

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