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.
この記事は Finweek English の 7 November 2019 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Finweek English の 7 November 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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