The South African government recently announced a significant increase in public funding for the embattled utility parastatal, Eskom, following on from an earlier multi-year “bailout” plan announced in February. As we have detailed in prior articles, for years the state-owned electricity company has faced a number of serious challenges ranging from poor operational oversight, an ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants as well as rising coal feed stock prices. More importantly, it has been the very significant cost overrun on the construction of two new large coal-fired power plants which have pushed the parastatal’s debt