The Western Cape: A Voice in a Failing, POWERLESS State
South Africa’s power crisis is not some freak accident. It is the result of years of running the country on an old, dirty, overworked coal fleet and then pretending emergency fixes count as a strategy. The country still got about 82% of its electricity from coal in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s a system built for another era. When those stations fail — and they do, over and over — Eskom leans on diesel-burning turbines to stop the whole thing from falling over. Those turbines were meant for emergencies. In South Africa, they became part of the routine. Even in 2024, with load shedding easing somewhat, the CSIR said diesel generation still made up around 6% of output. That tells you everything: the grid is still standing partly because the country keeps pouring expensive fuel into a crisis machine.
And that crisis machine is brutally expensive. In its results for the year ended 31 March 2024, Eskom said it spent R33.9 billion on diesel for its open-cycle gas turbines. At the same time, the utility recorded 329 days of load shedding, while its energy availability factor fell to just 54.56%. In plain English, nearly half the generation fleet was unavailable when the country needed it most. Eskom also posted a R55 billion after-tax loss, while municipal debt to Eskom hit R74.4 billion. So the picture is not just bad power stations. It is bad power stations, ruinous emergency fuel costs, collapsing municipal finances, and a utility that has been trapped in survival mode for years.
Then there is the corruption. South Africans know this story by heart by now: tenders, connected people, inflated contracts, missing accountability, and the public left to pay for it in darkness. The Auditor-General has repeatedly flagged control failures and irregular expenditure at Eskom. The state capture years turned the power sector into a feeding trough, and the consequences are still sitting in the walls of the system. The Special Investigating Unit says the ABB contract linked to Kusile worth R2.5 billion was set aside, with R2.5 billion to be repaid in punitive reparations, while SAP-related contracts worth R1.2 billion were also set aside and around R570 million was repaid to Eskom. That is money that should have gone into maintenance, reliability, and expansion. Instead, it went into deals, networks, and rot.
That is why the contrast with the Western Cape stands out so sharply. It is not that the province lives on another grid — it doesn’t. It still gets hit by national failures. But its leadership has at least tried to build resilience instead of waiting around for Eskom to save the day. In his 25 February 2026 State of the Province Address, Premier Alan Winde said the provincial Energy Resilience Programme added 819 MW to the Western Cape grid in 2024/25, with another 1,000 MW expected in 2025/26. That does not solve South Africa’s national crisis overnight, but it shows what competent administration looks like: planning ahead, diversifying supply, and treating energy like a governing priority instead of a patronage racket. That is the real indictment of the ANC government — not just that the national system is failing, but that better governance has shown the collapse was never inevitable.
