President Thabo Mbeki made the wrong policy choice in the early 2000s when his administration chose to ignore pleas by Eskom to start investing in new generation capacity. Mbeki himself made a rare public apology to this effect in 2007 when load-shedding began. “We said not now, later. We were wrong. Eskom was right. We were wrong,” he said.

This one policy choice not to prioritise basic infrastructure has cost SA billions of rand in lost GDP...

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