The Excellerate Executive Brief

10 Feb 2023

We would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the inaugural Excellerate Executive Brief.

The Executive Brief is intended to provide you with current socio-economic and political information as well as crime intelligence that might be useful to you in the course of your tactical and strategic planning.

The need for access to credible information became acutely obvious during the numerous civil unrests and pandemics to which we have been exposed over the past few years. In response to this need, Excellerate Services has partnered with various local and international research and intelligence organisations. We believe that receiving reliable intel in advance, affords Excellerate the best opportunity to mitigate risk and support our clients - forewarned is after all forearmed. With this is mind we have made the decision to share this intelligence with our clients as we receive it.  

This week we focus on electricity (or lack thereof). Given the mounting evidence of a correlation between loadshedding and crime, we asked the Centre for Risk Analysis for an opinion on current and future energy availability.

Their report paints a dismal picture of Eskom’s ability to improve its Energy Availability Factor (EAF). The short-term outlook for electricity is dire with warning of persistent Stage 7 or Stage 8 loadshedding in the course of 2023.  At best we are warned to expect “some sort” of permanent Stage 2 and Stage 3 for at least another two years. Read the full report here.

In addition, a recent Dragonfly SIAS report has highlighted the following impact of the energy crisis:

• Over the coming year electricity provision is highly likely to worsen and make for an even more challenging operational environment for business not least due to transport delays and additional costs.
• Protests are likely to become more frequent as activists have already begun to mobilise around electricity-related grievances.
• A more adversarial political environment ahead of the general election scheduled for May 2024 will also probably hamper the government’s energy policy execution.

Advice

If you have not already done so, our advice to clients is to work with us to update your emergency plans and response procedures taking into consideration the knock-on effect of load shedding. Alternative sources of back-up power to safety and security infrastructure are a non-negotiable. 

We are aware that the ever-present threat of national civil unrest is on top of the agenda for risk managers. At Excellerate Services we continue to collaborate with all relevant security agencies and international experts in Tactical Operations. We have made significant investments into our Tactical Response capabilities and now operate on a Three-Tiered readiness program, driven out of our National Command and Control Centre.

Our operations teams are available to work with you to prepare site-specific battle plans. In the words of Alexander Graham Bell “Before anything else, preparation is the Key to Success”