It came as no surprise that Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown has scotched suggestions that embattled power utility Eskom might have to be partly privatised to save it from financial ruin.
"Eskom is critical for the government to implement its developmental agenda. And it would be a grave mistake to privatise this critical player in the economy," she declared.
Previous suggestions that the power utility be broken up and sold off to the private sector have met with a similar response from the ANC's powerful alliance partners, Cosatu and the SA Communist Party.
And yet it is obvious that something dramatic has got to be done with Eskom to ensure that the developmental agenda that Brown speaks of does not come to nought.
Repeated bouts of load-shedding since 2007-2008 have discouraged investment and slowed the country's GDP growth.
Non-payment of electricity bills to the tune of billions of rands by many communities- and some municipalities - is surely also a grave threat to the government's goal of bringing affordable electricity to all citizens. Instead of carping about the remote prospect of privatisation, politicians in the ANC alliance should be actively campaigning in communities to ensure that people who can afford to pay for electricity actually do so.
The situation is dire: as it strives to ramp up our flagging power reserves by building new mega-plants, Eskom faces a R50-billion cash crunch and a long-term funding shortfall of about R225-billion.
Because a significant restructuring of the parastatal is a nonstarter for political reasons, the government needs to act urgently to finalise the regularity framework that will allow private-sector partnerships with Eskom on independent power projects.
The government also needs to listen to the advice of its own planning commission and rethink its commitment to procuring 9600MW of nuclear energy, which could cost up to R1-trillion.
The financial hole in which Eskom now finds itself should be enough of a deterrent.
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