Pretoria - Government has noted rating agency Standard and Poor’s decision to affirm South Africa’s long and short term foreign and local currency Issuer Default Ratings at ‘BBB-/A-3’ and ‘BBB+/A-2’, respectively.
The rating agency also affirmed the stable outlook, said National Treasury on Monday.
Standard and Poor’s (S&P’s) acknowledged that South Africa has several strengths which include broad political and institutional stability, policy continuity, fiscal prudence that will help contain the country’s fiscal and external balances and deep financial markets.
“While S&P noted that growth in 2015 would be limited as a result of electricity supply shortages, the agency said it expected growth to increase over 2016-2018 as electricity supply, domestic consumption and net exports improve. Government has committed to redouble the efforts to deal with the challenges identified by S&P.”
National Treasury said that insofar as the energy constraints is concerned, efforts to resolve the challenges are well under way.
“Eskom will be capitalised in a deficit neutral manner as per plan; independent power producers are delivering close to 2000 megawatts (MW) of electricity and more have been contracted that will take their contribution to around 5 000MW when construction of the plants is completed.”
National Treasury further added that the implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP) is getting embedded in the way government works as it started with a granular plan on the ocean economy and is being extended to agriculture and other areas of delivery. – SAnews.gov.za
