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JOHANNESBURG, July 23 (Reuters) - South Africa's economic, governance and criminal justice reforms slowed for the first time since 2024, with more reform targets missed than met, a quarterly tracker by business lobby group Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) showed on Thursday.
Investors are closely watching South Africa's reform push to gauge whether long-standing bottlenecks in electricity as well as rail and port logistics - which have weighed on economic growth for years - are being resolved.
• Reform completion index fell to 71.1 in Q2 2026, down 0.6 points from Q1 but still 26% above the March 2024 baseline.
• Of 172 reform targets tracked, 13 improved and 20 worsened, the first quarter setbacks outnumbered gains.
• Eskom and the Department of Electricity and Energy tried to structure the utility's unbundling to keep transmission inside Eskom, clashing with a law requiring an independent grid operator.
• The presidency intervened to reverse the move. Eskom's distribution, generation and regulation divisions have called changes to electricity market rules and have threatened a judicial review if their objections aren't met.
• Eskom forecasts no load shedding this winter and power surpluses above 5GW, but renewable power producers face rising curtailment and a backlog of about 2 billion rand ($121.79 million) in unpaid compensation.
• The biggest improvement came from the Electronic Travel Authorisation visa system; the sharpest setback was AI governance for financial institutions after a draft National AI Policy was withdrawn over AI-generated errors. ($1 = 16.4218 rand)
(Reporting by Colleen Goko, editing by Karin Strohecker)
