Multi-Party Charter Unveils Plan to End Rolling Blackouts and Achieve Energy Security
28 February 2024
South Africa’s first-time voters of 2024 have never known life without loadshedding. Our economy has lost hundreds of billions of Rand, and countless small businesses have shut their doors, because the ineptitude, corruption and mismanagement of Eskom by national government has destroyed South Africa’s energy security.
In 2024, there is urgent need for the electorate to remove a failed government and hand the reins to a leadership with the skills, political will and integrity to end rolling blackouts and increase sustainable energy development. The Multi-Party Charter for South Africa is that leadership.
Today the eleven parties in the Multi-Party Charter unveiled a Charter Government’s plan to create a competitive energy market that is centred on increased private power generation. The Charter will end Eskom's monopoly and establish a competitive, open electricity market, putting Eskom’s years of underperformance and endless bailouts behind us.
The reforms announced by the Charter today will secure South Africa’s energy future while increasing clean, renewable energy utilisation. This will increase living standards and improve the well-being of all South Africans.
To achieve these goals, the Charter has adopted a three-pronged approach: reforming Eskom, establishing an open energy market, and ensuring a just transition to a renewable energy future.
The Charter’s specific plans, as discussed in greater detail by the Charter Leaders, include the following –
1. Expediting the unbundling process of Eskom to produce a separate transmission company, which will be a stand-alone grid and market operator.
2. Abolishing the Ministry of Electricity and housing its functions within existing Ministries.
3. Ensuring that appointments at Eskom and other energy sector leadership roles are based on merit, eliminating political interference in the board and management of Eskom, ending cadre deployment and eradicating corruption in the energy sector.
4. Investing heavily in maintaining and upgrading grid infrastructure.
5. Creating a conducive regulatory environment for the construction of micro-grids.
6. Establishing a competitive electricity supply market where multiple electricity producers can compete on an open platform.
7. Facilitating and encouraging the wheeling of power between distributed generators and customers through transmission and distribution grids by approving standard wheeling tariffs.
8. Aggressively promoting demand-side management to reduce electricity demand.
9. Incentivising the rapid roll-out of rooftop PV through feed-in-tariffs, tax rebates on installation, and the zero-rating of PV panels and components.
10. Collaborating with domestic and international partners to achieve a rapid and just energy transition from coal to cleaner and more diversified sustainable energy sources. The Charter is committed to retraining and reskilling individuals within the coal sector to ensure that the socio-economic impact of the energy transition is justly managed. Care will be taken to ensure that this transition does not result in job losses or place the nation’s energy security at risk.
These commitments have been agreed to by all the signatory parties to the Multi-Party Charter, having consulted with a broad range of experts and capitalizing on the governance experience within the Charter.
We invite the electorate to consider the powerful impact you can make towards securing a stable energy supply, by installing a Multi-Party Charter Government in the coming election. While the individual parties within the Charter are campaigning on their own merit, with distinct policies, brands and offerings, voters can confidently cast their vote knowing what each party will provide within a Charter Government.
This level of unity and vision is unprecedented in South African politics, and is exactly what our country needs.
Statement issued by the Multi-Party Charter, 28 February 2024
