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Guys here is Template @KePiitso COPY AND PASTE 3 September 2026 To: The Energy Regulator National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) Kulawula House, 526 Madiba Street, Arcadia, Pretoria REF: Comments on the Consultation Paper on the Eskom Retail Tariff Structural Adjustment (ERTSA) Application for Standard Tariffs for the 2027/28 Financial Year, published 2 September 2026 (closing date for comments: 2 October 2026, 16:00) Subject: Unconditional objection to any further electricity price increase - nothing less than a reduction is acceptable Dear Members of the Energy Regulator 1. I write in terms of the public participation process to record my unconditional objection to Eskom's ERTSA application for the 2027/28 financial year, which proposes yet another average increase of approximately 8.8% in the price of electricity. I say this at the outset, clearly and without equivocation: nothing but a reduction in the price of electricity is acceptable. Another increase is not merely undesirable - it is unjustifiable, unaffordable and unconscionable in the current economic climate. 2. Over the past twenty years, the price of electricity in South Africa has risen by more than 900% - cumulative increases that have outpaced inflation by a wide margin and dwarfed wage growth for ordinary workers. Every single year, South Africans are told that this year's increase is the last one, or the minimum possible, or somehow for our own good. Yet the increases never stop. Even the Regulator's most recent determination, approving an average increase of 8.76% for 2026/27, landed on consumers who are already drowning, and Eskom is already back asking for 8.8% more. Each increase compounds the last, and the burden is never lifted - it is only passed on. 3. This country is in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis. Food prices, fuel, municipal rates, transport and housing have all risen relentlessly, while salaries and wages have not kept pace. Working South Africans are doing more hours for less real money, and every cent counts. Electricity is not a luxury that can be cut from a budget - it is a basic need: it cooks our food, keeps medicine cold, lights our children's homework, and powers the small enterprises that employ our neighbours. For the poor, who spend a far larger share of their income on energy and who buy electricity through prepaid metres, every tariff increase is a direct, immediate cut to an already inadequate income. When the price of electricity rises, it is not Eskom's shareholders who feel it - it is the pensioner in a two-room house in winter, and the domestic worker who must choose between a warm meal and electricity for the week. The poor and the working class bear the brunt of every increase, and they can bear no more. 4. Eskom's demand for yet another increase is all the more indefensible given its own financial results. Eskom has now recorded its first profit since 2017 - R23.9 billion before tax in the 2024/25 financial year - and reports indicate that profits have since more than doubled. Eskom's own annual results attribute this turnaround in large measure to tariff increases already granted. In other words, the South African public has already paid for Eskom's recovery through higher prices, and Eskom now returns to the trough asking for more, while sitting on record profits. Those profits should be applied to reducing the price of electricity and easing the burden on consumers - not to funding yet another round of increases. A profitable Eskom that still demands annual hikes is not a utility in need; it is a monopoly that has learned that the public will always have to pay.

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