Darlene Creamer

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Darlene Creamer

WORRYING RISE

22nd April 2022 The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s gauge of global food prices rose at a record pace in March, fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the United Nations body has warned of further increases to come. Food inflation in South Africa also continues to accelerate, with the Bureau for Food... →

SLOTS FOR SALE

15th April 2022 State-owned freight logistics group Transnet is turning to the private sector in a bid to revive the fortunes of two underperforming rail corridors. The group’s rail unit has officially launched a bidding process for 16 rail slots on both the container corridor from Durban to City Deep and its... →

EXPLOSIVE SHACKLES

8th April 2022 South Africa’s official unemployment rate rose to a record 35.3% in the fourth quarter of 2021. The Quarterly Labour Force Survey showed that the number of unemployed people increased by 278 000 to 7.9-million. It’s a terrifying figure. Even more terrifying, however, is a youth unemployment rate... →

HIKED TO HURT

1st April 2022 While nothing even resembling the pain being experienced by Ukrainians living in towns and cities being attacked by the Russian military, South Africans are not immune from the economic hurt flowing from the invasion. Fuel prices will rise sharply again in April after having already surged in the... →

INFLATION MONSTER

25th March 2022 After a relatively long hibernation, the inflation monster is awake and ready to eat the income and wealth of all citizens, poor and rich alike. Initially awakened by uneven supply-chain recovery efforts following the Covid lockdowns, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has poked the monster further.... →

SHAMEFUL

18th March 2022 While it’s not difficult to point out the West’s hypocrisy in its response to Russia’s vicious invasion of Ukraine, South Africa’s own response has been shameful. The decision to abstain in a United Nations vote condemning Russia has been rationalised on the basis on this country’s commitment to... →

CROSSING THE LINE

11th March 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin made the world a less safe place than it already was when he authorised the invasion of his democratic neighbour on February 24 on the false pretexts of “demilitarisation and de-Nazification”. The steep escalation in tensions when Russian troops crossed the... →

BREAKING POINT

4th March 2022 Some of the crime statistics included in the report covering the third quarter of the 2021/22 fiscal year are beyond upsetting. South Africa recorded 6 859 murders in the three-month period, up from 6 279 in the corresponding period of 2020, while 9 556 people were raped. Yet, instead of an... →

RED-TAPE ALERT

25th February 2022 For several years, government has been promising to cut the unnecessary red tape undermining entrepreneurship and stifling investment. For this reason, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment of business luminary Sipho Nkosi as his red-tape-reduction czar has been welcomed. That welcome has been... →

DEATHLY ROOTS

18th February 2022 There is nothing startling in the report of the expert panel appointed to review government’s response to the July 2021 civil unrest. It confirms that factional politics is now having deadly consequences, that poverty and inequality are dry tinder just waiting for a spark and that our public... →

THE PPE WE NEED NOW

11th February 2022 The final Special Investigating Unit report into fraud and corruption linked to the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as other works and services purchased in response to Covid, makes for grim reading. The report deals with contracts valued collectively at over... →

PRICE SHOCK

4th February 2022 As expected, none of the non-Eskom stakeholders who made oral representations to the energy regulator on Eskom’s request for a 20.5% increase had any sympathy for such a hike. Doubly so given the context of a weak economic outlook, rising unemployment and deepening poverty. That said, many of the... →

ENSNARED BY AMBITION

28th January 2022 Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s deeply offensive and unsubstantiated attack on the judiciary and her undermining of a constitution that she has taken an oath to defend has all the hallmarks of an overly ambitious politician who cynically believes that ends (securing the ANC presidency in this... →

DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

21st January 2022 South Africa simply cannot afford a repeat of 2021 this year. Further delays in dealing with the country’s big problems of load-shedding, economic and social crime, vaccine hesitancy and, most worryingly, a growth rate that is too low to make a dent into chronic unemployment will set the scene... →

(OMI)NOUS OR SIGNAL?

10th December 2021 Given patchy global vaccination penetration and ongoing hesitancy at home, the emergence of a new Covid-19 variant was as inevitable as the fourth wave. Far less inevitable is the health risk posed by Omicron. Especially if there is stricter adherence to the proven nonpharmaceutical protocols and... →

RUNGS OF HELL

3rd December 2021 South Africa’s deep electricity crisis has its genesis not in the past 18 months and not even in the past decade, although it was definitely made worse by the toxic State-capture years and maintenance neglect. The crisis can be traced back to policy and regulatory missteps that date all the way... →

MOVE ON

26th November 2021 Despite the advanced age of Eskom’s coal fleet, coal power will remain a significant part of the domestic electricity mix for many years yet, with the new Medupi and Kusile stations having extended coal’s horizon by decades. South Africa should not be planning to build any new coal capacity,... →

ENERGY SAPPING

19th November 2021 There is no quick fix for South Africa’s growth- and confidence-sapping bouts of load-shedding. The coal fleet has been run too hard for too long and maintenance neglected. South Africa’s stop/start procurement of new electricity means that the capacity needed to support stable operations amid... →

HARD HAT

12th November 2021 Besides being known as the ultimate African National Congress insider, Enoch Godongwana, South Africa’s new Finance Minister, is also known for wearing homburg hats, often with the feather on the side. With his maiden Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement behind him, it appears that holding the... →

ENERGY SQUEEZE

5th November 2021 Scottish rock band Stealers Wheel, sang about ‘Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right!’ in their 1970s hit song ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’. At the tail-end of 2021, South African consumers are equally stuck in the middle . . . of an energy crunch. With load-shedding to the left and... →

FLATTEN THE CURVE

29th October 2021 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group 1 report, which assesses the physical science basis for climate change, points to a near-linear relationship between cumulative human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the global warming they cause. The report also... →

LEAP OF LOGIC

22nd October 2021 While President Cyril Ramaphosa was urging investors to embrace green energy and calling on rich countries to support developed country energy transitions with concessional finance, his Mineral Resources and Energy Minister was jumping to a very different conclusion. Gwede Mantashe said green... →

REGULATORY RUCTIONS:

15th October 2021 The decision of the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) to reject Eskom’s revenue applications for the three-year period from 2022/23 to 2024/25 has created ructions. The decision is based on the fact that Nersa is reviewing the current methodology, which it says has failed to... →

NEW BARRIER

8th October 2021 South Africans were rightly upset by the opaque, and seemingly non-scientific reasoning, behind the UK government’s recent decision to keep the country on its Covid Red List. The country’s exports could face similar seemingly unfair treatment as the European Union prepares to implement a tariffs... →

VOTER HESITANCY

1st October 2021 Vaccine hesitancy is not the only form of hesitancy troubling South Africans. Many eligible voters are deeply uncertain about how best to exercise their November 1 municipal vote, despite chronic power, water, pothole, and refuse problems, as well as a never-ending stream of corruption scandals.... →

APP(Y) DAYS

24th September 2021 With signs of waning vaccine uptake, South Africa is set to join a growing list of countries that require either digital or physical proof of vaccination before an individual can participate in certain activities. Since August, France has stipulated that a Passe Sanitaire QR-code is required for... →

VOTING FOR MANDATES

17th September 2021 The announcement of South Africa’s municipal election date more or less coincided with Discovery’s announcement that the company intended moving to a mandatory Covid vaccination policy from January 1. The move will not make CEO Adrian Gore popular with everyone, especially in a context of ongoing... →

FISSI(ON) THE MENU

10th September 2021 Moves to open the way for 2 500 MW of new nuclear capacity raises a menu of questions. If new nuclear is affordable, why is there no allocation for it in the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)? If it’s designed to replace power from Inga, why is there not a broader IRP overhaul to test the least-cost... →

GATEWAY OR WALL

3rd September 2021 South Africa’s ports have had a torrid two years: operations were hit hard during the early onset of the Covid-19 pandemic; the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng riots rocked the N3 corridor and the Port of Durban; and Transnet was then hit by a debilitating cyber-attack. Even before these events,... →

NO TIME TO HESITATE

27th August 2021 After an excruciatingly slow start and some bad luck, South Africa’s vaccination programme is no longer supply constrained. Demand, however, has become a new concern, with vaccine hesitancy the major cause. This is worrying for several reasons but is especially worrying from an economic... →

REAL RISK

20th August 2021 Yes, supporters of former President Jacob Zuma deliberately planned and executed a strategy to destabilise the country when they initiated attacks on key economic infrastructure following his jailing in Estcourt. The deadly riots that followed, however, were sustained partly by the desperate... →

HACK WARNING

13th August 2021 The recent cyber-attack on Transnet, which paralysed operations at the country’s ports only days after deadly rioting did likewise, was yet another warning of just how vulnerable the country’s economic infrastructure is to cyber-crime. All companies, but especially South Africa’s utilities, will... →

HORRIFYING REFLECTION

6th August 2021 The recent insurrection, which triggered widespread and deadly violence and looting, was a test of both South Africa’s world-class Constitution and its maturing democracy. While both passed the test, it nevertheless reflected horribly on the country and its image as a stable and safe investment... →

BUILDING BACK

30th July 2021 The three C’s of ‘conspiracy’, ‘conditions’ and ‘capacity’ combined toxically this month when South Africa witnessed deplorable scenes of deadly violence, theft and destruction. The conspirators had been plotting insurrection ever since Cyril Ramaphosa’s razor-thin 2017 Nasrec victory and were... →

RACE IS ON

23rd July 2021 For South Africa to have any chance of extending its 2021 economic rebound into a full-blown multidecade recovery, an Olympian effort has to be made to vaccinate as many people as possible in as fast a time as possible. Much like the Covid-affected Tokyo Olympics, South Africa is in a real race.... →

DELTA BLOW

16th July 2021 As the Delta variant blows through South Africa and many other countries, the good news is that the vaccines remain effective. The bad news is that South Africa’s slow pace of vaccination has left them unable to provide any meaningful protection against the third wave. Every effort now needs to... →

DELTA BLOW: As the Delta variant blows through South Africa and many other countries, the good news is that the vaccines remain effective. The bad news is that South Africa’s slow pace of vaccination has left them unable to provide any meaningful protection against the third wave. Every effort now needs to be made to ensure a rapid increase in the pace and scale of the vaccination drive, particularly as the supply constraints ease.

JABS & JOBS

9th July 2021 There is little question that the mass Covid vaccination roll-out represents South Africa’s most important economic stimulus programme and will provide the foundation for job-creating investment. After a sluggish start and then some serious early setbacks, the programme is at last picking up... →

TRANSMISSION TRANSITION

2nd July 2021 The creation, by year-end, of the Independent Transmission System and Market Operator, or ITSMO, is arguably the most important next reform required to align the electricity supply industry (ESI) with the unfolding energy transition. Without an efficient and, ultimately, fully independent... →

STEADY CLIMB

25th June 2021 For years, South Africa has been promising reforms to stimulate growth, investment and jobs. Until this month, however, those pledges have not been translated into action. On June 10, President Cyril Ramaphosa took a big step when he announced a major electricity reform. A day later, Public... →

IN THE COLD

18th June 2021 It’s another winter of discontent, as Eskom once again resorts to regular power cuts to stabilise its unreliable system. Maddeningly, South Africa would probably be exiting its 13-year load-shedding crisis had it simply proceeded with its yearly procurement of new capacity from independent power... →

MONSTROUS CURVE

11th June 2021 South Africa’s official unemployment rate increased to a terrifying 32.6% in the first quarter of 2021, the highest level since the report was introduced 13 years ago. On the expanded definition the picture is far worse, at 43.2%. Frighteningly, only 15-million of South Africa’s 39.5-million... →

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