JOHANNESBURG – South Africans are looking to President Cyril Ramaphosa for answers after the latest round of load shedding; the most severe to hit the country.
Eskom says it had no choice but to implement stage 4 load shedding on Monday after an urgent need to shed 4,000 megawatts off the grid.
Stage 4 load shedding has never been implemented before, and this drastic measure by Eskom took the country by surprise.
But it appears that even President Ramaphosa was not expecting the latest development, saying it came as a shock and was most worrying.
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Energy expert Chris Yelland agrees that this move was unprecedented and speaks to how dire the situation is at the debt-ridden power utility.
“This is uncharted territory. So, it’s much deeper than it’s ever been before, and it did come as a surprise because it was announced that six generation units shut down as a result of unplanned outages.”
Ramaphosa recently announced plans to unbundle Eskom into three entities to deal with generation, transmission, and distribution.
Labour unions have vowed to fight the plan, arguing that it’s the onset of privatizing Eskom