‘We Need Competitive Energy'

JSE-listed Hulisani is an investment company focused in the secondary energy market. David McKay spoke to the company’s CEO, Marubini Raphulu, about our energy crisis, the redrafted Integrated Resource Plan and whether or not there is political will to turn the lights on for good.

- David McKay

The view from Marubini Raphulu’s office is pretty impressive. A few floors below, Sandton’s Rivonia road pulses with traffic. Neighbouring new-age, glass-panelled offices soar and sweep. There’s even a smattering of jacaranda, now in bloom, just beyond in the moneyed suburbs.

Behold the Sandton bubble. Nothing, though, pops the illusion of developed economy nirvana, such as the Sandton central business district skyline, quite like the debilitating energy crisis in which South Africa currently finds itself.

The lights go off, the traffic snarls, and hundreds of diesel-burning generators rattle into motion. More seriously, investors second-guess plans to invest while the rating agencies that influence the sovereign cost of capital turn the dimmer down on the country’s creditworthiness.

For Raphulu, CEO of Hulisani – a JSElisted investment company focused in the secondary energy market – energy security is an economic and a human question; of those primal needs the country can’t afford to ignore.

“Energy is a primary need,” he says in an interview with finweek. “And when you’re looking at energy, you’re looking at water and you’re looking at food: these are the things people feel passionately about, and rightly so,” he says.

This is why government has long sought to protect its control over the energy market, only grudgingly allowing the private sector to participate. “The concern is ... the private sector’s driven solely by motive: the profit motive, and it will double prices,” says Raphulu.

But the Eskom debacle, which has heaped unsustainable financial pressure on the power utility, has brought government to a place where it can no longer keep the private sector leashed.