South Africa has declared a national state of disaster over the country’s worst-ever spate of rolling blackouts, as the government scrambles to remove obstacles to investing in energy supply outside the broken Eskom power monopoly.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the measure would take immediate effect during a state of the nation address on Thursday, as he warned that the power cuts that have hit Africa’s most industrial nation every day this year were “an existential threat to our economy and our social fabric”.
Eskom has had to cut off swaths of customers for up to 10 hours per day in recent months in order to prevent the accelerating collapse of ageing coal power plants, the mainstay of South Africa’s power network, turning into a total grid breakdown.