South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his 2026 State of the Nation address, announced that the country’s electricity transmission assets would move out of state-owned Eskom. This will happen once the newly established National Transmission Company of South Africa is unbundled into a fully independent company.
This is not the first time Ramaphosa has used his State of the Nation address to keep South Africa’s electricity reforms on track. In 2021, he raised the cap on private power generation from 1MW to 100MW. Minister Gwede Mantashe at the time admitted that the president had “twisted his arm”.
In 2022, Ramaphosa removed the cap altogether, unleashing a torrent of private investment.
