🔒 Boardroom Talk: Looking beyond today’s electricity crisis suggests pain won’t have been in vain

By Alec Hogg

When you’re in the middle of a crisis, it’s difficult to see past the immediate. As the saying goes, who needs strategy when you’re in a hole and your backside is being bitten by crocodiles…..just get out of the hole

Yet one day future historians are likely to look back on SA’s energy crisis as a major turning point for the nation. It has comprehensively destroyed the ANC’s ruinous ‘Developmental State’ fantasy. Signals the inevitable sobering up of the socialist who, in Maggie Thatcher’s parlance, has finally run out of other people’s money.

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As you’ll read below in the interview with Cyril Ramaphosa’s new electricity minister, even those who previously championed Eskom find the monopoly distasteful. Scales have lifted from ANC eyes. Examples like the efficient coal-fired Kelvin power station (est 1957, privatised 2001) providing a template for rejuvenating older Eskom units. 

On the demand side, an newly informed nation is replacing power-hungry appliances, making electricity conservation and self-sufficiency a priority. Commodity traders have long preached how the cure for a high oil price is a high oil price. South Africans are suddenly appreciating that electricity follows the same cast iron economics law.

More for you to read:

  • Warren Buffett called in for discussions with US president on Banking Crisis. Click here. 
  • Why Is Credit Suisse in Trouble? The Banking Turmoil Explained. The Swiss bank has weathered a period of market crises, executive turnover and financial losses. Click here. 
  • Shades of Omar al-Bashir redux at BRICs summit in SA in August as Russia’s Vladimir Putin Faces Arrest Warrant by International Criminal Court. Click here.

Half an hour of Magnus Heystek being quizzed at BNC#5 by members of the BizNews community. Here’s his response to the curveballs, penetrating and tough questions on the hot financial topics of the moment.
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