The FF Plus requests President Cyril Ramaphosa and the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, Mr Ebrahim Patel, to abandon the specific regulations driving Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) to ensure that the most effective procurement policies and expertise are made available on merit to sustainably address the country’s power crisis.
A lack of expert officials and engineers as well as middlemen who unduly benefit from BEE in the value chain – from coal supply to general consumables – by asking extortionate prices have over time dealt Eskom’s cost effectiveness a severe blow and ultimately resulted in load shedding.
Authoritative research by Solidarity’s Research Institute indicates that Eskom suffered a loss of R9,1 billion in 2021, and that BEE most probably cost the utility more than R12 billion.
If all racial requirements for the procurement and registration of power generation projects at the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) are not scrapped, the plan to save South Africa from an energy disaster will fail.
The FF Plus will keep striving to ensure that merit alone determines appointments and procurement because BEE, as it is currently implemented by government, has paved the way for maladministration and corruption, which benefited only a small number of individuals while being to the detriment of the rest of South Africa.
Read the original article in Afrikaans by Jaco Mulder on FF Plus
