Private Power Surge Breaks Eskom's Grip; What Changes for South Africa's Households

Mteto Nyati’s appointment to chair a revamped Eskom board was a small, precise decision that changed everything. When President Cyril Ramaphosa opened electricity generation to private players, lifting licensing thresholds and then scrapping them entirely for embedded generation, the results were concrete: a R390bn project pipeline unlocked, Eskom’s monopoly broken, and more than 15 months without load-shedding. Technical expertise, not political instinct, drove that outcome. Regulatory barriers fell, and capacity followed.

That same logic now underpins the third phase of the Government-Business Partnership, unveiled last week by Ramaphosa. The initiative, co-convened by Discovery CEO Adrian Gore since 2023, has moved beyond crisis management. The first two phases tackled energy, transport, logistics, crime, and corruption. Now mining, tourism, infrastructure, and agriculture enter the fold, with an ambitious target: a million additional jobs by 2030 and GDP growth sustainably above 3%.

Gore’s conviction that South Africa possesses the productive capacity to reach that threshold is infectious. Mining sits as a “geological superpower” capable of unlocking R50bn in investment but remains, as he describes it, “kind of asleep.” Tourism, where every 13 additional visitors support one job, operates far below potential. Agriculture and agro-processing account for 12% of exports yet could expand substantially. South Africa’s capital markets, deep and sophisticated, have the resources to finance the infrastructure backlog if projects prove bankable.

The constraints are known. The solutions exist. Yet the economy managed only 1.1% growth last year, and the Reserve Bank’s medium-term outlook pencils in just 2% for 2029. That gap between Gore’s optimism and the actual trajectory exposes the real problem: business cannot do what only government can.

A private sector can dismantle bottlenecks one project at a time. It can invest, take risks, and execute. What it cannot do is make a dysfunctional municipality functional, issue a mining right, reform procurement, fix Transnet, or prosecute criminals. It cannot guarantee that reforms negotiated with one administration survive the next political cycle.

That uncertainty starts with the ANC itself. The party’s manifesto, unveiled this past weekend, offered only familiar promises. A Social Research Foundation poll shows ANC support for the local government election at 34%, down from 45% in 2021, while the DA has climbed to 27% from roughly 21%. The party that has governed municipalities for decades now faces the task of repairing them, yet offers no vision equal to the scale of decay.

The contradiction runs deeper. Ramaphosa and his administration make progress with business through initiatives like the Government-Business Partnership, then undermine that progress in the next breath. The appointment of the disgraced Dina Pule as social development minister adds another chapter to a pattern of decisions that corrode confidence in state institutions.

Gore is right that confidence matters. Optimism has power. But an economy growing at 1.1% cannot simply be willed to grow at three times that rate. Business must invest, yes. Government must make the calls that enable investment, including the politically difficult ones. The ANC’s developmental-state ideology became obsolete the moment government money ran out. What can restore this economy’s vitality is a private sector genuinely freed to do what it does best.

Until that freedom is real and durable, the question hanging over every partnership announcement is the same: who, exactly, will make the hard political calls that no business forum can make for them?