While addressing thousands of ANC supporters, President Ramaphosa said South Africa needs to fight and defeat load shedding while he lauded the party’s achievements over the last thirty years in government.
The ANC supporters had come out in large numbers from different parts of Gauteng to converge in Dobsonville, Soweto to listen to their leaders give a performance review and report back of the progress it has made in implementing the party’s policy from the last general elections.
This was also a scene-setter for the drafting of the ANC’s 2024 election manifesto.
Ramaphosa said load shedding started in 1998 when Eskom wanted to build new power stations and admitted that bad decisions were made in the past but now the government had a deeper understanding of where the real challenges lied and was correcting them.
“The people are seeing the steps being taken to address all these challenges. The Minister of Electricity has been doing an excellent job, and working together with the Minister of Public Enterprises and Minister of Energy, have been working well to fix our electricity challenges.
“Loadshedding has a negative impact on the economy and by the time of going to the elections in 2024 load shedding will be a thing of the past,” Ramaphosa said.
While Ramaphosa dealt with loadshedding matters, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi focused on Gauteng youth job creation efforts and promised that 6 000 jobs will be created every month in the province until July 2024.
Lesufi also bemoaned load shedding saying power outages have become worse since 2019.
“But we are committing ourselves and the government that I have the honour to lead, that all those communities that have transformers that are broken, stolen, we are going to those communities to install new transformers to ensure they are connected.”
Lesufi also urged Ramaphosa to unleash the army and the police to on illegal miners saying residents were under siege from these heavily armed criminals.