President Cyril Ramaphosa noted on Monday that business is working with government to build capacity within the National Prosecuting Authority and the Hawks, alongside the modernisation of the 10111 emergency response centre and collaboration between industry and the South African Police Service to address crimes targeting key infrastructure.

In his weekly letter to the nation, Ramaphosa pointed out that since June, government had been working closely with alliance group Business for South Africa (B4SA) on critical actions to address the key challenges of energy, logistics, and crime and corruption.

“While these partnerships may take different forms and may be at different stages of advancement, both business and labour have shown their commitment to work with government to address these challenges,” he said.

Ramaphosa said this kind of “cooperation in action” gives meaning to a social compact based on achievable outcomes, even more so than negotiated agreements.

Last week, together with several Cabinet members, Ramaphosa held a meeting with business leaders organised under the umbrella of B4SA.

Last month, he met with the leadership of the country’s four labour federations, where parties agreed to work more closely to address the immediate challenges that confront South Africa’s economy.

He said these efforts were important as a slow-growing economy could not create enough jobs and also could not generate enough revenue for government to fully implement the programmes needed to improve people’s lives.

He promised that government, with its social partners, was acting with increased focus and effort to remove the most immediate constraints on growth.

ACHIEVING ENERGY SECURITY

Ramaphosa highlighted that last week’s meeting confirmed that good traction had been achieved in the areas of energy, logistics, and crime and corruption, most notably in the work being done by the National Energy Crisis Committee to end loadshedding and achieve energy security.

“A good example of the work being done is the mobilisation by business of additional capacity and skills to support the recovery of Eskom’s power plants. This includes the deployment of technical support teams to five power stations, Kendal, Kriel, Majuba, Matla and Tutuka, and experts to help speed up the repair of units at Kusile power station that were damaged in November last year. This weekend, Kusile unit 3 was returned to service two months earlier than planned,” he said.

Ramaphosa noted that the full implementation of the plan to improve the performance of Eskom’s existing power stations, add new generation capacity and reform the energy sector was expected to result in over 12 000 MW of generation capacity being recovered or added to the system by the end of 2024.