Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa's proposed electricity pricing overhaul is the first serious attempt to confront this directly.
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Since 2007, electricity tariffs have risen by 987%. Inflation over the same period: 150%. That gap is not a policy failure. It is a sustained economic injustice, one that has quietly stripped purchasing power from every household in the country and dragged at the 60% of GDP that consumer spending drives.
What makes that number more damning is the context in which those increases landed. For years, consumers absorbed relentless tariff hikes while sitting in the dark, paying premium prices for a service that routinely failed to arrive. Load shedding did not pause the bills. Eskom's dysfunction did not trigger a rebate. South Africans paid more for less, for longer than any utility customer should reasonably be expected to tolerate.
Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa's proposed electricity pricing overhaul is the first serious attempt to confront this directly. At its core, the reform recognises what administrators have long ignored: that rising administered prices are not abstract line items. They erode the real value of old-age pensions and social grants, pulling the rug out from under the country's most vulnerable people.
The proposal to restructure tariffs in favour of low-income households and to revisit the 50kWh free basic electricity allocation introduced in 2003 is overdue. Consumption patterns have changed. Poor households now run refrigerators and kettles. The current allocation does not reflect that reality, and a policy that pretends otherwise is not a social wage. It is a bookkeeping exercise.
For business, the promise of structured pricing categories and greater cost predictability matters as much as the tariff level itself. Uncertainty is its own tax. Affordable, stable energy is the foundation on which investment decisions are made.
The policy is headed for Cabinet, and public comment is expected by the end of May. That window should be used. South Africa does not need another elegantly worded document that changes nothing. It needs a pricing regime that treats energy as the public good it is.