For the residents who filled the Dutch Reformed Church hall in Port Alfred on Monday night, the Democratic Alliance’s Samantha Graham-Maré could not have come at a better time. The deputy electricity minister brought grounding, and a degree of hope to a rate-paying community desperate at the prospect of massive electricity tariff increases, and seething at what they consider punitive requirements for small scale embedded generator owners. Add to that Graham-Maré’s encouragement for opposing the proposed Ndlambe name changes, and she went straight to the heart of the constituency’s concerns.
For most of those attending, it was probably the first time since the formation of the government of national unity (GNU) that they’d had direct contact with someone in national government.
“I assure you that the GNU is nowhere near as tentative and fragile as it looks from the outside,” Graham-Maré assured the gathering.
She acknowledged that some had accused the party of “selling out”. However, she assured her audience, “We knew we were where we had to be and we took the decision to protect our country.”
She said they’d known that in order to survive, the ANC would have to enter into an alliance with another party, and the alternatives, she hinted, would have been dire. But the past year had been extraordinarily tough.
“Being in government is much, much harder than being the opposition,” Graham-Maré said. This was because as politicians, instead of pointing out the problems, they were now held accountable for them.
“It’s been a year of learning and understanding.”
Graham-Maré highlighted the successes of her fellow DA ministers and deputy ministers in the departments of home affairs, public works, basic education and agriculture.
Explaining her position, Graham-Maré sketched for her audience the recent changes in governance of the energy sector that had led to the establishment of the single national Department of Electricity on April 1 this year. She had high praise for Minister of Electricity and Energy, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, saying he was the best minister in govern,ent – before quickly adding, “the best ANC minister in government”.
Graham-Maré’s roles include the oversight of nuclear resources for medicine, and municipalities.
“Our goal is to make municipalities more efficient, sustainable and profitable when it comes to the distribution of electricity,” she said.
Managing energy efficiency, registration and regulation were some of her areas of duty.
Describing some of the policy backlogs they were dealing with, she said South Africa’s Rural Energy Plan, started six years ago, had taken three years to complete, then sat on someone’s desk for another two-and-a-half.
“When we discovered it in September last year, it took just six months to get it through Cabinet.”
Graham-Maré let her audience into how it had been possible to stop loadshedding: private electricity generation was producing 6.5 gigawatts* of the country’s requirements.
She said government’s intention was to avoid going back to loadshedding by focusing on building a reliable and sustainable energy supply. This included the erection of 14 000km of transmission lines in a R450-billion project.
Graham-Maré then touched on the energy issue closest to Ndlambe residents’ hearts, namely, skyrocketing tariffs. She acknowledged that there were problems with the current electricity pricing policies.
“What is charged for electricity should be cost reflective,” she said. “We are looking for ways for municipalities to buy cheaper electricity for example solar power, that we can sell back to municipalities. That cost-saving would then be passed on to the consumer.”
Graham-Maré noted the fact that most municipal electricity grids are managed by electricians rather than electrical engineers.
Municipalities can’t attract qualified engineers,” she said.
On the question of SSEGs, Graham-Maré said that while the national department could not interfere with how municipalities ran, she noted that local government did not have the capacity to develop partnership policies for SSEG projects.
*Corrected from ‘megawatts’ to gigawatts.
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This article was first published in Talk of the Town, August 21, 2025. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.
