SOUTH AFRICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE PUSH MUST REVIVE MANUFACTURING AND CREATE JOBS, RAMAPHOSA SAYS
Fourteen thousand kilometres of new transmission lines. That is the scale of what South Africa must build over the coming decade, and President Cyril Ramaphosa wants every metre of it to put South Africans to work in factories, not just on construction sites. Speaking to the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa (SEIFSA) at a presidential business breakfast on Thursday, Ramaphosa framed the roughly R1 trillion infrastructure programme as an industrial strategy first and a construction project second, with direct consequences for employment, economic resilience and the productive capacity that ordinary citizens depend on every day.
The stakes for the public are immediate. Companies in the metals, engineering and capital equipment sectors manufacture equipment essential to mining, electricity, transport and other services that sustain the broader economy. Yet those same companies operate under weak domestic demand, logistics constraints, high electricity costs, infrastructure bottlenecks and mounting import competition. Globally, fragile steel demand, excess capacity, geopolitical tensions and energy price volatility compound these pressures. Investment decisions are delayed, profit margins are squeezed, factories run below capacity and jobs are placed at risk.
Electricity reform is the most immediate lever available. South Africa has achieved the milestone of ending load shedding, but electricity costs remain prohibitively high for energy-intensive industries such as smelters, with tariffs rising significantly faster than inflation over two decades. The South African Wholesale Electricity Market, expected to begin operating next year, will introduce competition among multiple generators. Simultaneously, the Eskom Restructuring Task Team has been established to create a fully independent, state-owned transmission company. Together, these reforms aim to improve both supply security and cost. Ramaphosa stressed that affordability must become as central as availability, a distinction that matters directly to households and industries alike.
The transmission network expansion presents the largest single opportunity. The roughly 14,000 kilometres of new lines required, alongside major investment in substations and transformation capacity, represent the largest transmission expansion in the country’s history. The demand this creates for fabricated steel, conductors, cables, transformers, insulators, switchgear, substation equipment, engineering services and logistics should, in the President’s view, deliberately rebuild South Africa’s existing capabilities in steel fabrication and electrical equipment manufacturing. Without that deliberate strategy, Ramaphosa cautioned, South Africa could find itself a decade from now with a vastly expanded transmission grid but a diminished domestic manufacturing industry. The grid would exist; the jobs would not.
Meanwhile, freight logistics reform opens a parallel front. Multiple train operating companies are gaining access to the freight rail network, and South Africa once possessed formidable capabilities in railway engineering and equipment manufacturing. Significant private investment will be required to restore locomotives, wagons, signalling systems and terminal capacity. The same logic applies to port infrastructure and the water sector, where approximately R24 billion flows annually through national grants in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure, with additional investment mobilised through public-private partnerships.
The energy transition itself should become an industrial transition. Rather than importing technologies for the new energy economy, South Africa should manufacture towers, transformers, cables, switchgear, structural steel and electrical equipment where existing capability allows or can realistically be developed. Opportunities also exist in green metals, mineral beneficiation, battery manufacturing and green hydrogen.
For citizens and workers, one practical obstacle stands out: manufacturers cannot invest in new factories without visibility of future demand. Ramaphosa acknowledged that government must improve the coordination and publication of its infrastructure pipeline so companies can anticipate procurement by government, state-owned enterprises and other public institutions over the next five, ten and even fifteen years. As he put it, predictability creates investment, investment creates capacity, and capacity creates jobs.
Skills development must sit at the centre of every infrastructure contract. South Africa’s major industrial companies historically trained artisans, fitters, turners, electricians, boilermakers, welders, millwrights and toolmakers. Ramaphosa proposed that every major infrastructure contract measure success not only by the infrastructure delivered but also by the number of apprentices trained, artisans qualified, young engineers gaining experience and local suppliers developed. This approach transforms infrastructure spending into workforce renewal, a public good that outlasts any single project.
Steel sits at the foundation of this entire vision. The President described it as a strategic industry and national priority, noting that without steel there are no transmission towers, railway lines, mines, factories, bridges, ports or major water infrastructure. Supporting a competitive and sustainable steel industry must therefore go hand in hand with competitiveness itself, meaning the industry must invest in modern technology, improve productivity, reduce carbon intensity and produce consistently to international standards.
The African Continental Free Trade Area extends the horizon further. With access to a market of more than a billion people investing in cities, railways, power stations, transmission networks, mines, factories, water systems and ports across the continent, Ramaphosa set out an ambition for South Africa to become the engineering workshop of Africa, exporting transformers, mining machinery, railway equipment, pumps, valves, fabricated steel, electrical equipment and engineering expertise. Further details on the government’s approach are available at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/infrastructure-investment-must-rebuild-south-african-industry-president-ramaphosa.
South Africa already possesses the minerals, infrastructure base, engineering capability, industrial experience and entrepreneurs needed to realise this ambition, along with a generation of young people eager for skills and opportunity. The infrastructure programme, Ramaphosa argued, should become the foundation of a new era of industrialisation. Whether government can deliver the pipeline transparency and coordination that manufacturers say they need to commit to that future remains the open question.