South Africa’s public market is broken. The number of listed companies has more than halved, with a further 20 already expected to delist in 2022. We need to start fixing it.
The ANC-led government entered its fifth term with an own goal: an electricity crisis. This was long in the making. It dated back to decisions taken in the 1990s that there was no need to invest in new power stations as there was “overcapacity”, and perhaps also to a sense in some quarters that Eskom, the national electricity supplier, would be privatised and private investors would come in. The process of awarding tenders, and the vested interests that emerged from this, together with a failure to carry out proper preventive maintenance, on top of outright bad management at Eskom, led, by the end of 2014, to both planned and unplanned power outages (known euphemistically as “load shedding”).