Editorial: Ramaphosa must act or lose our goodwill

Afew people have said that after waiting for an hour for President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address to start on Thursday, they switched channels or went to bed.

The question is: Did they miss out on anything of importance?

Well, they at least spared themselves another 30 minutes of EFF theatrics, which were never going to achieve anything meaningful.

The EFF, with its 12% support from the electorate, can never decide who should or should not be in Cabinet.

Much as it has the right to denounce the performance of any government minister, it is not entitled to blackmail the president into firing Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan.

It was all meaningless theatre and spectacle.

But back to the speech. Ramaphosa in effect stuck to the mundane and predictable.

It was a president trying to reassure a citizenry that increasingly feels he has not delivered on his initial promise, that he was aware of all the challenges the country is facing, and would fix them.

Ramaphosa did not waste time in tackling the issue bedevilling every citizen and business: load shedding.

He conceded that the rolling blackouts have damaged the country. To fix this, he announced several measures to mitigate the crisis.

The president gave the green light for the decentralisation of power generation, signalling a new “trajectory of energy generation”.

Another measure he announced was bringing on board independent power producers to alleviate pressure on the national grid.

They will also be allowed to supply power to municipalities.

A ministerial determination will be issued soon to give effect to last year’s Integrated Resource Plan.

This will enable the development of additional grid capacity from renewable energy sources such as natural gas, hydropower, battery storage and coal.

This was the only ray of light in an otherwise dull and unimaginative address.

At last there are some concrete steps being taken to add electricity generation capacity outside of Eskom.

It’s a significant step that should have been taken a long time ago – before the crisis became so severe.

Nevertheless, it is better late than never.

But the president and his executive must not be intimidated by the ANC’s alliance partners, the Irvin Jims of this world and other noise makers from within the governing party.

If there is one concrete thing he must deliver before his first term ends, it is power supply that is reliable enough to restart the economy and make our lives livable.

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