Load shedding over, focus turns to soaring power costs: Ramaphosa – SABC News – Breaking news, special reports, world, business, sport coverage of all South African current events. Africa’s news leader.

President Cyril Ramaphosa says the next phase of South Africa’s electricity reform programme must focus on reducing the cost of power, warning that rising tariffs are placing severe pressure on key industries.

While load shedding has largely been eliminated, Ramaphosa says affordable electricity remains critical to sustaining energy-intensive sectors such as metals and engineering.

Addressing business leaders, the President acknowledged ongoing challenges linked to load reduction in some communities but stressed that future reforms must balance security of supply with competitive electricity prices to support industrial growth, investment and job creation.

He said, “Now, for the metals and engineering industries, few reforms are more important than those underway in electricity. Working together, we have succeeded in bringing load shedding to an end. There is still load reduction in stock, particularly in many parts of our country because of illegal connections, but in the main, load shedding has gone. This is a major achievement.”

The President says, however, that reliability alone is not enough.

“Electricity must also be affordable. For energy-intensive industries, electricity prices have become an existential challenge, and in fact, we’ve had many of your counterparts coming forward to say that unless something is done, they are going to close and thousands of people are going to lose jobs. That is precisely the challenge. Over the past two decades, electricity tariffs have increased far faster than inflation itself, ” he says.

The president added that in some cases, electricity charges are much higher than even labour charges.

“A number of smelters and other energy-intensive operations have either closed or reduced production or faced the prospect of closure. These are not industries that can simply be switched off today and restarted tomorrow. Once a smelter closes, we lose productive capacity in our country, we lose skills, we lose export earnings, we weaken entire industrial value chains, and we lose jobs. That is why the next phase of electricity reform must now focus, must now focus us not only on security of supply, which we’ve been working on, but also on reducing the cost of electricity.”