SACP on Eskom’s application for revenue for the 2023/24 financial year
12 January 2023
The South African Communist Party (SACP) vehemently opposed the skyrocketing electricity tariff hikes that have made access to electricity increasingly costly. Eskom’s application for a 32 percent tariff hike for the 2023/24 financial year, if granted by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa), will manifestly be an additional albatross on the working class and poor, who already face a growing list of impoverishing burdens on their necks.
The SACP calls upon the Government to be proactive in sufficiently funding and recapitalising the public energy utility, protecting Eskom as a state-owned entity and ensuring that it serves the public. This would go a long way to ensure that Eskom is protected from profit driven private interests which would worsen the situation of the majority working-class and poor as electricity would henceforth be accessible only to those who can afford, and thus drown the poor deeper into the abyss of darkness.
Many people might think that load-shedding and pressures to transition to low-carbon energy sources are the only challenges facing South Africa in the sector. Rising electricity tariffs, making access to electricity exorbitant and unaffordable to the workers and poor, as well as to the lower sections of the middle-class, are a critical indicator of the energy challenges and crisis that South African needs to overcome. The National Treasury seems to include and thus also rely on Eskom tariff hikes as a source of funds to address its electricity generation and debt crises instead of sufficiently funding and recapitalising the public power utility.
The SACP denounces the policy choices that have made and continue to make electricity unaffordable, also impacting on the economy. A just transition must make electricity accessible, especially to the workers and poor, and protect workers and the environment.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee and Political Bureau Member: Spokesperson and Secretary for Policy and Research, 12 January 2023
