The address will take place at 19h00 on Thursday.
The SONA will also be streamed live below. The build-up show to the event is already taking place:South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver his seventh state-of-the-nation address on Thursday at a parlous juncture in his tenure.
With next year’s elections gearing up to be the most hotly contested since apartheid ended in 1994, Ramaphosa needs to provide solutions to the country’s myriad problems to bolster his chances of winning another term. He’ll deliver his speech in the Cape Town city hall, because parliament is still being rebuilt after being gutted by a fire.
He’s also likely to touch on a plan announced last year for the government to take over as much as two-thirds of Eskom’s R396 billion of debt, with Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana set to announce details of the bailout in the 22 February budget. The options include getting Eskom to answer to the energy ministry and moving state logistics company Transnet and South African Airways to the Ministry of Transport. The president has also faced calls to split the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy in two, and to amalgamate some smaller departments.Civil servants’ salaries have risen by an annual average of two percentage points above inflation for the past decade and paying them now accounts for almost a third of state expenditure.