ELECTRICITY generation, and supply, have become South Africa’s perennial albatross around the neck.
So much so, that our country is credited with the popularization of the term “load-shedding”. And so constant has this societal inconvenience been since 2007 that, to a large extent, load-shedding has come to be accepted as a normal occurrence in SA.
At the beginning of the year, President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the energy crisis by declaring a national state of disaster.
Today might, however, just be the beginning of the end of load-shedding, thanks to the flourishing bilateral relations between Pretoria and Beijing.
Minister in the Presidency in charge of Electricity, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, is scheduled to receive on behalf of the government the desperately needed and much-awaited consignment of energy equipment from China.
The hand-over ceremony in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, is expected to be the first in a series that will see China keep the promise to aid SA’s power rejuvenation drive made by President Xi Jinping during his state visit to SA in August.
This is a welcome gesture that SA no doubt is over the moon to receive. Millions of rands are lost each day of load-shedding in SA. China, being SA’s biggest trading partner for the past 13 years, holds SA in high esteem as a fellow BRICS member and a strategic regional powerhouse.
China boasts the world’s biggest growing economy and it stands at 2nd behind the world’s only remaining superpower since the end of the Cold War, the US.
That SA can count upon China to wiggle out of the long-running power crisis is proof that the constant telephone, video call and private letter exchanges are acts of trusted comradeship and mutually beneficial relations between the two statesmen.
The donation hand-over ceremony is regarded very highly by both sides China’s envoy to SA, Ambassador Chen Xiaodong, will personally attend and deliver a message of support.
He will outline China’s support in detail, elaborating on the donated emergency energy equipment, technical experts, specific expertise and also personnel training as part of the skills transfer between the two allies.
Some of the Chinese equipment has already been distributed to hospitals across SA, schools and other public institutions. A press attache at the embassy of China said: “The equipment has all been up and running already. They couldn’t wait for today’s hand-over ceremony. They were required urgently.”
China will hand over 450 gasoline generators. The next scheduled batch of equipment from China in the new year will be worth R150 million and will include five power-supply vehicles, an additional 39 diesel generators and 60 sets of PV storage and power supply systems.
The Chinese government believes that its intervention “will make a good contribution” to SA’s efforts to alleviate continuous power shortages.
