JOHANNESBURG, Sept 19 (Reuters) – South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa will miss the United Nations General Assembly this week and return home from Britain to address a national energy crisis, his spokesman told local media, including the eNCA television channel.
State power company Eskom moved into “Stage 6” power cuts on Sunday for the third time in history, meaning most South Africans are without power for at least six hours a day. read more
Eskom has implemented outages for more than a decade that have stifled economic growth in Africa’s most industrialized nation. Amid mounting public anger, Ramaphosa promised new steps to address the crisis in July, but power outages persisted.
This is not the first time a trip abroad has been interrupted by the energy crisis. In 2019, Ramaphosa ended a visit to Egypt early so that he could return home and deal with the same problem.
Ramaphosa’s spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, told private television channel eNCA that the president, currently in Britain for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, was scheduled to travel to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.
“He’s decided to cancel that,” Magwenya said.
Instead, he will travel back to South Africa immediately after Monday’s funeral.
Ramaphosa wants to better understand what led to a large number of recent failures in Eskom’s generation fleet and what progress has been made in the interventions it announced in July, Magwenya added.
He said South Africa’s statement at the UN General Assembly will instead be delivered by Minister for International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor.
Reporting by Alexander Winning Editing by James Macharia Chege and Catherine Evans
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