The National State of Disaster, a legal measure put in place in February to expedite efforts to address a life-threatening electricity shortage, was lifted by the South African government on Wednesday.
Although they have become less frequent in recent weeks, daily power outages still happen throughout South Africa.
The official statement read, “Government has terminated the National State of Disaster with immediate effect.”
Over the past year, South Africa has suffered from unprecedented blackouts that were brought on by growing issues at the struggling power company Eskom.
According to Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, the outages, also referred to as load-shedding locally, result in daily production losses of more than $50 million.
President Cyril Ramaphosa declared the country to be in a state of disaster during his annual state of the nation address.
It opened up more resources and made it possible for the government to implement energy projects by navigating some bureaucratic red tape.
The declaration, according to the government’s statement on Wednesday, allowed it to “enhance interventions” meant to increase energy supplies.
However, according to Parks Tau, Deputy Minister for Cooperative Governance, the “extraordinary” measure was always intended to be temporary, and the government decided the extra authority it had granted was no longer required.
Tau said at a press conference, “Of course, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a problem; the outages continue.
“However, we’ve found that the mitigation measures already in place are actually capable of mitigating and steadily reducing the levels of load-shedding.”
The appointment of Kgosientso Ramokgopa as an electricity minister, which was also announced in February, has been credited by the government with “significantly enabling the improvement in the supply of electricity,” it was noted.
“The Minister has recently conducted oversight visits to power plants… to identify and address electricity supply constraints,” it stated.
Eskom predicts that power outages will last for at least another year.
