If outages continue at those levels, said Chris Hattingh, head of policy analysis at the Centre for Risk Analysis, South Africa’s GDP growth this year will likely be capped at 1.5%.
The most severe power cuts ever experienced in South Africa are threatening food and water supplies and disrupting the lives of millions of people, including chicken farmers.
In July last year, the government outlined a ten-point power plan to address power cuts. Some of the details included buying power from independent producers, scrapping licensing requirements for private energy projects, and 'importing' electricity from Botswana and Zambia. South Africa then went on to have its worst year of blackouts to date, around 200 days. Right now, the situation doesn't look like it will get any better. Let's find out what went wrong with Senior Research at the Centre of Risk Analysis, Chris Hattingh.
That bureaucracy and regulatory confusion are stifling the training of specialist nurses in SA bodes ill for the planned National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme.
Although it’s a constitutional responsibility of the state to ensure that the country is secure, the paradoxical reality of South African citizens staying on while things fall apart is to make sure that they are “state secure”, says Chris Hattingh from the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA).
But despite these utterances and desires, it is unclear how precisely expanding the central bank’s mandate – to, for example, dictate looser monetary policy and lower interest rates (in a higher inflation context) – will cure the myriad ideological and policy wounds the governing party has inflicted on the economy.
All in all a dynamic environment for the foreseeable future but with adversity comes opportunity and taking on these challenges is part of South Africa’s DNA, especially if businesses, communities, and civil society organisations can work together.
That SA is one of the countries cited as a potential drag on the Sub-Saharan African region’s growth prospects for 2023 stands to reason given the ideological and policy constraints imposed on the country’s potential by the government.