After a period in the doldrums, South Africa is on the rebound. The essential power and logistics sectors are back to almost normal, and growth is inching upwards. This is the story that Brand South Africa, the country’s official marketing agency, wants the global investor community to hear. Omar Ben Yedder reports.
F or a country widely acknowledged to be Africa’s most sophisticated and industrialised economy, South Africa’s persistent power cuts were an embarrassing challenge to the country’s self-image, adding to a general sense of hopelessness and malaise that some critics had come to associate with the rainbow nation.
Today, however, South Africa is able to tell a different story. “South Africa has turned an important corner on energy security. We have moved from chronic generation shortages to a position where available generation is exceeding current demand, and Eskom is maintaining excess capacity in reserve. That is a significant confidence signal to investors, and we must now accelerate investment in transmission, distribution and new generation to sustain that advantage,” reports Ipeleng Selele, chairperson of Brand South Africa.
“We’re not counting outages any more because we’ve turned a corner,” Selele adds, referring to the nation’s infamous power shortages. “In fact, we’ve got a surplus in terms of power.”
According to Eskom’s latest published operational update, it maintains 5,728MW in cold reserve “due to excess capacity”. For the evening peak cited in that update, forecast demand was 23,360MW, against 26,419MW of available capacity. Eskom also reported a year-to-date Energy Availability Factor of 67.87%, its highest in six years, with unplanned outages substantially reduced.
As a result, there has been a dramatic improvement in load-shedding, which businesses and consumers had come to view with expectant dread. In May 2026, Eskom reached 365 consecutive days without load-shedding, and announced that it had met 100% of national electricity demand during that period. More recently, Eskom reported that generation capacity continues to exceed demand.
The bottom line has also felt the impact. For the financial year ending March 2026, the state utility reported profit after tax of R30.3bn (over $1.5bn), the second consecutive year in the black and an increase on the previous year’s R14.bn.
That Eskom can turn its fortunes around, Selele says, is a clear sign to investors that South Africa is once again on the up. “Investors want to see that. Before anyone wants to put in their money, their heart and cash into your economy, they want to see where you’ve improved yourself as a country.”
This is the story that Brand South Africa is hoping to sell as it engages with the investor community on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York, USA. The story is that South Africa has the capacity to resolve its structural problems. “Our capability is greater than our challenges,” Selele insists.
Tackling economic growth
According to Selele, South Africa’s rebound has been structured around three phases. “Phase one was about stabilisation. Phase two was about reform and phase three is now about growth,” she explains.
Specifically, the aim is to move economic growth, which has long hovered around 1%, beyond 3% and to add a million more jobs by 2030. These are the goals of Phase 3 of the Government-Business Partnership, which President Cyril Ramaphosa officially launched in August.
The private sector is an essential part of the story, and the government is deepening its partnership with private investors. Selele, who herself has a background in the private sector, believes that helps her better understand what investors want to see before they commit their capital.
“Investors don’t want fluff. What an investor is really interested in is where you are and what you are doing about some of the areas of improvement that would have been raised before,” she points out.
That means offering policy credibility and certainty, improving ease of business and opening up more opportunities, as the government has done in rail, energy and logistics.
Investors also want to see that the government, as a partner, has the quality to deliver on shared goals. “Your story is not believable unless you have a solid team that has built a track record in their own individual businesses, so they can then help the country to turn a corner,” Selele notes. “It’s always about the jockeys behind this process.”
Ports and railways
For some time, South Africa’s ports and railways have been another major constraint on the economy, particularly for the export-intensive mining sector. Congestion, ageing equipment and operational inefficiencies increased costs for mining companies and shipping lines, undermining one of the country’s most important sources of foreign exchange.
Selele says Transnet, the freight transport and logistics company, is beginning to turn the corner in much the same way as the power sector has. The figures support her assertion. In the 2025/26 financial year, vessel arrivals at South Africa’s ports rose 9% year-on-year to 8,630, while cargo throughput across its eight commercial seaports increased 4.2% to about 304m tonnes.
And while the recoveries at Eskom and Transnet are far from complete, Selele says they send an important signal to investors and partners. “There’s still a long way to go,” she acknowledges, but insists that “we have to look at the little milestones which make up what we call success.”
The bigger test will be how these milestones can help launch the growth that the government is targeting. Mining, one of the sectors identified by the Government-Business Partnership, for example, has tremendous potential for a country with proven wealth in natural resources.
The country is already a major producer of platinum-group metals and vanadium, but Selele argues that the investment opportunity extends beyond extracting those minerals. “Where are the tangible projects that can then demonstrate the very same investment case of mining the commodity, beneficiating it, and then using it?” she asks. Increased local processing would mean capturing more value and consequently, more growth and jobs.
Cultural achievements
Selele also insists that the country has the required human capital for the tasks. The country’s pedigree, she says, is obvious not only in its economic performance but across a wide breadth of achievements, such as sports and culture.
“When you look at the way the [national rugby team] Springboks perform on the international stage and its upcoming global tour against the All Blacks [of New Zealand], you cannot deny that the national brand story of South Africa is enriched by so many different aspects,” Selele says. In addition, she points to international DJ Black Coffee, singer Tyla and the Amapiano (a trendy musical form) as well as the country’s fashion industry, with MaXhosa participating at the Paris Fashion Week in September, as examples of global excellence and of South African icons that have worldwide appeal.
Brand South Africa’s job is to turn all of these disparate areas of potential and achievement into a simple and compelling story for the audiences at the UN events in New York and for investors around the world. And that story is likely to be that South Africa is facing its problems squarely and has shown that it has the capacity to resolve them.
The country has demonstrated that it can stabilise its electricity system. It is making progress in logistics. It is opening up the rail sector and freight network to private-sector operators. It has institutions and businesses with deep expertise, a substantial mineral endowment and a diversified economy.
“We don’t deny the challenges,” Selele says. “But what we know for sure is that our capability and strength outweigh that, and it’s greater.” For Brand South Africa, the task now is to persuade the rest of the world to believe this, not just by repetition but through the numbers posted, the reforms undertaken, and the quality of the people delivering them.
The post The lights, and optimism are back on in South Africa appeared first on New African Magazine .
The lights, and optimism are back on in South Africa
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at NewAfricanMagazine.