Hon Chairperson, it has been drummed into our heads that South Africa has an energy crisis and, of course, many of us have experienced it first-hand. What is an energy crisis? In laymen's terms a situation reaches a stage of being a crisis when it was ignored at a stage when it could still have been called a problem. Is that what we did? Did we ignore an obvious problem and land ourselves in a crisis; and whom do we hold responsible for it?
Wikipedia defines an energy crisis as any bottleneck or price rise in the supply of energy resources to an economy. Its causes may be overconsumption, ageing infrastructure, choke-point disruption or bottlenecks at oil refineries. An emergency may emerge during unusually cold winters due to the increased consumption of energy. The South African electricity crisis in 2008 led to large price rises in platinum and reduced gold production, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of job losses - and that is obviously a crisis.
Former President Thabo Mbeki apologised for the load shedding in what could otherwise be interpreted as government taking responsibility for the failures of a state-owned enterprise, namely Eskom. The puzzling question is: Why must ordinary citizens, who have obviously been wronged in this process, pay for Eskom's failures? Why the 36% price hike in the coming three years? Eskom has been widely criticised for failing to adequately maintain existing power stations or plan for and construct sufficient electricity-generating capacity. How that criticism has translated to consumers being charged the extra 36% eludes us.
The views of Ompi Aphane from the Energy Department, who was a panelist on the debate entitled "South Africa's optimal energy mix", are interesting in that he alluded to new legislation coming to Parliament to introduce a separate parastatal on renewable energy. Could we really be looking at creating another parastatal when the current entity's problems are far from being resolved?
Energy is truly a crisis in South Africa. As I conclude my speech in this debate, I would like to say on behalf of the UCDP that the real crisis is the fact that 24% of South African citizens do not have access to electricity or any other form of energy. We support the Budget Vote. I thank you. [Time expired.]