President Cyril Ramaphosa has described the move to establish a fully independent State-owned transmission company as “one of the most important reforms in our country’s history”, while confirming the composition of the dedicated task team he has established to clarify the implementation and timing of its establishment.

In his response to the debate on his State of the Nation Address (SoNA), the President also emphasised the complexity of the initiative, which he said required detailed technical work and strong coordination across different entities.

“That is why I have established a dedicated task team under the National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom), which reports to me, and in which participates the Presidency, the Minister of Electricity and Energy and his department, the Minister of Finance and his department, as well as Eskom to effectively manage and steer the process.”

The decision to set up a task team was initially unveiled in his SoNA on February 12, when Ramaphosa stated that the new entity would have ownership and control of the transmission assets and be responsible for operating the electricity market.

The announcement effectively reversed an earlier decision by Eskom and Electricity and Energy Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa to set up a Transmission System Operator without assets, with those assets to be retained by an Eskom Holdings subsidiary.

With his SoNA announcement having been seen by some commentators as a rebuke of Eskom and Ramokgopa, the President used his response to the SoNA to laud the Minister and the utility.

“Through its generation recovery plan, Eskom has increased its average energy availability factor from 56% in April 2023 to around 65% at present,” he said, while highlighting Ramokgopa’s role in driving an innovative new model for independent transmission projects.

“For an economy that has long been held back by energy constraints, these developments are potentially transformative. For homes that have suffered years of electricity supply interruptions, the end of loadshedding is a relief. For businesses, it was the removal of an obstacle to growth,” he said.

Having been criticised by various respondents to the SoNA for establishing yet more task teams to address everything from the water crisis to the foot-and-mouth pandemic, Ramaphosa also used his February 19 response to emphasise the value of both Necom and other task teams in tackling complex problems.

“There were groans from some quarters, who said: ‘Yet another committee’,” Ramaphosa acknowledged.

“Yet what Necom did was to bring together all the key roleplayers to focus on the immediate tasks necessary to end loadshedding, to restore the integrity of our power system and to lay the basis for stable, sustainable and universal access to electricity into the future.”