Consumers and businesses were left shell-shocked by Nersa’s decision to grant Eskom an 18.65% electricity tariff increase for the period 2023/24. Picture: Danie Van Der Lith/African News Agency (ANA)
Cape Town - Citizens need to mount a national campaign against high electricity tariffs as they pose a direct threat to the country’s economic stability.
Last week consumers and businesses were left shell-shocked by Nersa’s decision to grant Eskom an 18.65% electricity tariff increase for the period 2023/24. For the period 2024 to 2025, Nersa approved a tariff increase set at 12.74%. These increases mean electricity will become very expensive for the poor and the already hard-pressed middle class.
This will also sound the death knell for small businesses hard hit by a series of events, including Covid-19 lockdowns.
In a nutshell, consumers are being punished for the ANC government’s corruption and incompetence that has led to the destruction of the power utility.
Particularly surprising is that in the wake of the electricity tariff increase, President Cyril Ramaphosa has been missing in action.
He has not said anything about the government’s plan to alleviate the suffering of South Africans by ending load shedding.
He has been silent on the government’s plan to soften the blow for the poor, who are already battling high food prices and a record unemployment rate.
Ramaphosa, who has just been rewarded with a second term as ANC president, has decided to bury his head in the sand while the country faces its biggest crisis since 1994.
Last week he told the media he could not interfere in a statutory process that will see South Africans forced to shoulder another electricity price hike. How insensitive and out of touch with reality can our president be?
It is clear that Ramaphosa and the party he leads are bereft of new ideas that can extricate the country from this quagmire.
It is indeed true that the “only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing”. Therefore, we call on civil society, religious and cultural organisations, ratepayers’ associations, businesses and ordinary South Africans to come together and protest against the daylight robbery instituted by Eskom and Nersa against the ordinary people of this country.
Imposing an 18.65% electricity tariff when people are subjected to stage 6 load shedding is unjust.
The country’s democratically elected government’s inability to speak out against this injustice makes it complicit.
Cape Times