The Democratic Alliance (DA) and the GOOD Party in Parliament believe that government in 2024 should begin to seriously consider joining hands with private partners in addressing the challenges faced by state-owned entities (SOEs).
For the past few years, many of these entities faced financial problems, with some receiving government bailouts.
Eskom, Transnet and South African Airways were just some of the government entities that were unable to restore their financial fortunes.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana described the financial support of R47 billion to Transnet as a “guarantee facility”.
He said it is aimed at assisting the company to deal with immediate debt obligations and support its turnaround plan.
State capture in the SOEs was cited by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan as one of the causes of the current financial woes in these entities.
“Some of the things at some of these SOEs is rising from the state capture and given the level of debt that we are in some of these SOEs, it’s important to leverage private sector participation and where necessary, private sector equity participation so that the state does not lose out of key institutions, projects or programmes in government.”
Partnership with the private sector
The DA, however, sought to emphasise the importance of government bringing in the private sector to assist the ailing SOEs.
DA Shadow Minister on Public Enterprises, Mimmy Gondwe says, “We hope, therefore, government will really prioritise public-private partnerships in relation to the operations and management of our ports so that our ports can then once again become among the best-performing ports in the world. And our imports and exports will no longer be hampered by the dysfunctional ports operations because it is exactly what happened with the port crises that we witnessed in the past few weeks, imports and exports not getting where they need to, and this had a real catastrophe in the economy.”
Gondwe says more needs to be done to fix the challenges facing Eskom and Transnet as well.
“And also, (government) must prioritise the commission of renewable energy projects to the grid and most importantly, fix Eskom’s poor financial position. And as the DA, we also welcome the recent load shedding judgment that was handed by the Gauteng High Court. The judgment found that countless preventable failures by this government as the ANC-led government, including failures to prevent load shedding, infringes on the rights of citizens, including the constitution. So, this landmark judgment underscores what we knew.”
GOOD echoes DA sentiments
GOOD Party MP, Brett Herron, agrees with the DA’s view of joining forces with the private sector when it comes to eradicating load shedding.
“So in the New Year, we need Eskom to generate and transmit enough electricity to end blackouts. Where they cannot provide sufficient electricity, they need to procure that electricity, preferably from renewable sources but certainly from the fastest available electricity supply and add it to our grid quickly and sustainably.”
