Notes

The Eastern Cape has started ordering Grade 1–3 materials from the new R1.6 billion Foundation Phase catalogue; the Western Cape is holding back. Forty readers a class, if they arrive by January.

In 2025 more than a third of South African households went two days or more without water. Among the metros, Cape Town was at 8% and eThekwini at 44%. The gap comes from maintenance, not rainfall.

From 1 October City Power is ‘ringfenced’: Johannesburg keeps 30% of electricity cash first; the utility gets 70% and still carries Eskom, losses, and a R44bn backlog.

Cape Town’s municipal planning tribunal approved the King Air Industria data-centre land-use changes 4–1 without water or diesel figures on the record. The approval is suspended on appeal; the city is drafting new guidelines.

State procurement is on the order of R800bn–R1.3trn a year. On 17 September the Constitutional Court invalidated the Public Procurement Act in full for failed public participation — so the reform that was meant to replace a fragmented regime is back at the starting line.

Treasury will run a three-year intervention in Johannesburg through the November elections — conditionality, not a blank cheque. The metro is ~16% of GDP and still living off a fiscal fiction.

About 10 million poor households may qualify for free basic electricity; only about 2 million receive it. The first new electricity pricing policy in 18 years still leaves the grant outside the tariff framework.

The oil import bill could have been R76bn lower in 2021–2024 if refined-product imports had stayed at 25%. 5,400 jobs displaced. CEF bought Sapref for R1; the three-phase revival still has no funding model.

Jan–Jun sugar imports rose from 1,619 t in 2022 to 124,594 t in 2026. DBRP moved only to $785. The 2007 biofuels strategy still has no commercial fuel ethanol.

Chapter 9 bodies want submissions on the justice system’s GBVF response by Friday. ISS puts intimate-partner femicide at five times the global rate — and conviction odds under one in five.

CREA puts Secunda’s air pollution at ~1,000 premature deaths and ~R16bn in health costs a year. UCT puts an unmanaged shutdown at R9.9bn of GDP. The reform problem is the gap between those two numbers.

Eskom has 2–3 GW of surplus generation while industrial demand is down 22.5% — turning that capacity into paid-for demand is the next reform test.

Unspent capital budgets point to project readiness, not a lack of money — and IDMS is still not compulsory.