Speech
Cyril Ramaphosa  ·  2026-08-13 12:46

President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers the Keynote Address at the SEIFSA Business Breakfast_7

Our renewable energy program can support domestic production, the production of towers, transformers, cables, switch gears, structural steel and other electrical equipment and you are the sector that is meant to do that. Our mineral endowment gives us an opportunity also to move further into green metals and mineral beneficiation and you stand at the center of it all. Our engineering capabilities position us to participate in emerging in industries such as battery manufacturing and green hydrogen. I have a massive battery that powers my solar and the person who installed it, he says, "Mr. President, did you know that this battery was made here in South Africa and it is one of the best that we have and this company is now exporting these batteries, a massive battery like that made here in South Africa." That gave me joy because it means that the heartbeat of steel manufacturing is still there in our country. And nowhere is the industrial opportunity more immediate than in the expansion of our electricity transmission network, our various other components of electrical uh uh proficiency over the coming decades. South Africa needs around as I said 14,000 kilometers of new transmission lines and together with major investment in substations and transformation uh capacity. This is the largest transmission expansion program in our country's history. And think for a moment about what this means. Thousands upon thousands of transmission towers, hundreds of thousands of tons of fabricated steel, thousands of kilometers of conductors and cables, transformers, insulators, switch gears, substation equipment, foundations, control systems, engineering services, trans transport and logistics. And all of these connected with your sector and behind every one of these products are factories, our workers, our engineers, artisans and suppliers. This should become one of the great industrial projects of our generation.