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For decades, Southern Africa’s electricity transmission landscape was defined by state control. Transmission lines, substations, system operations remained firmly in the hands of vertically integrated national utilities whose investment capacity could no longer keep up with demand, rising urbanisation, and the surge of independent power generation.
Today, this is beginning to change. Across Southern Africa, governments are dismantling long‑protected monopolies and introducing new legislative pathways that enable Independent Transmission Providers (ITPs). Among the countries leading this shift are South Africa and its Lusophone neighbours, Angola and Mozambique.
What is emerging is not a collection of isolated reforms, but a regional movement — a new paradigm for how African power systems should be built, financed, and operated. The stakes are high: electricity transmission remains one of the most significant bottlenecks to economic growth, energy security, and climate‑aligned development across the region.
South Africa: the pioneer
South Africa is the region’s legislative trailblazer, having launched the most sophisticated Independent Transmission Projects (ITP) framework in Africa. After years of rolling blackouts and stalled grid expansion, the government approved the ITP Programme in December 2023, paving the legal path for private developers to design, finance, and operate transmission projects under long‑term regulated agreements.
In 2023, South African authorities estimated that over the next decade, increases in generation capacity would require approximately 14,000 km of new transmission lines. Convinced by the need for private sector participation for grid expansion at the required pace, the government undertook a comprehensive market-sounding exercise to shape the ITP Programme and assess investor appetite. Market interest proved overwhelmingly positive: more than 130 responses were received from both local and international players.
This process culminated in the Minister of Energy and Electricity on 28 March 2025 publishing a landmark Ministerial Determination under the Electricity Regulation Act, 2006. The Determination designated the Department of Electricity and Energy as procurer and the National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA) as buyer for a 1,164 km pilot portfolio of 400 kV lines spanning three provinces. This was followed by publication of the new Electricity Transmission Infrastructure Regulations on 31 October 2025.
Work to bring the first projects to market is now underway. A request for pre-qualification to identify potential developers for an initial package of seven transmission lines was launched during the second half of 2025. The results were released on 15 December 2025 and confirmed that seven international consortia had been shortlisted.
Angola: an end to monopoly
Also, last summer, Angola enacted a long-awaited sweeping electricity reform. Through Law No. 6/25 of 23 July, amending the General Electricity Law, Angola abolished the state monopoly over transmission and opened the national grid to private concessions for the first time in the country’s history.
A core innovation of the new law is its explicit authorisation for public‑service concessions in the transmission sector, enabling private companies — for the first time — to finance, build, operate, and maintain transmission infrastructure within the National Transmission Network and its cross‑border interconnections. The law does this without prescribing any particular business model, hence opening the door for ITPs but also others models such as merchant lines.
To support fair competition and system integrity, the law restructures the institutional architecture governing transmission. Most notably, it integrates the National Dispatch System into the management of the Public Electricity System while imposing strict neutrality and independence requirements on the dispatching entity, particularly in its interactions with transmission concessionaires. This reform ensures that system operations do not favour state‑owned operators and that all market participants — including new private concessionaires — enjoy a level playing field.
Angolan government officials have been clear about the reform’s purpose: attracting investment, modernising the grid, and supporting regional power trade through the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). This is essential for Angola, given that its rapid expansion of generation capacity has outpaced the ability of its national grid to absorb and distribute power, resulting in significant underutilisation of existing generation assets.
Various projects aligned with these goals are mooted, including various cross-border ones. These include two interconnectors with DRC for which the government has entered into memoranda of understanding with Somagec of Morocco, one interconnector with Zambia and DRC for which the government has entered into a memorandum of understanding with a consortium comprising among others its sovereign wealth fund FSDEA and Africa 50, and one interconnector with Namibia, for which the expectation is that the government will be launching an international public tender to select a private investor to develop it under an ITP model.
A regional transformation underway
It is not only South Africa and Angola.
In Mozambique, where legislation has for some time permitted the concessioning of transmission lines (thought the ITP model has never been tested), the national utility, EdM, is now piloting the approach with Gridworks.
In Zambia, new open access regulations were enacted in 2024, breaking the monopoly of the national utility ZESCO. In Botswana, the Energy Regulatory Authority has launched the Electricity Supply Industry Reform Project, whose stated objective is to improve the sector by opening it up to more private-sector participation.
These are only a few examples. Across Southern Africa, a clear pattern is emerging: governments and national utilities – supported by multilateral institutions, private investors, and impact investors, among others, are increasingly adapting their policies, legislation and regulatory frameworks to foster private participation in electricity transmission. Their collective aim is to unlock the region’s vast electricity potential and enable the Southern African Power Pool to finally realise its founding ambitions.
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