President Cyril Ramaphosa has expressed anger and disappointment at Eskom’s announcement that it is applying stage four load-shedding across the country.
President @CyrilRamaphosa says he angry and shocked at the announcement that there will be stage four loadshedding, says angered that the country has reached that level of dysfunctionality. #sabcnews
— Sarah Kimani (@sarahkimani) February 11, 2019
Eskom earlier announced the stage four load-shedding after another six generating stations went offline.
Ramaphosa says Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan is urgently addressing the matter.
President Ramaphosa last week announced the splitting of Eskom into three units – generation, distribution and transmission.
Trade unions have slammed the move saying they are concerned about possible job losses.
Ramaphosa, who is in Addis Ababa for an AU heads of state meeting, says he’s concerned about the latest developments at Eskom.
Implementation of Stage 4 load-shedding
Stage four load shedding is expected to continue until 10pm this evening. Eskom has assured South Africans that there is no imminent threat of a national blackout despite the implementation of stage 4 load-shedding.
Eskom says at least six generators went offline – a higher number than had been expected. The embattled power utility is battling to keep the lights on amid a high maintenance schedule and shoddy work at its new generators Kusile and Medupi.
Calls for government to step in
The CEO of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Palesa Phili has called on government to step in and prevent further load-shedding.
Durban is a major industrial and manufacturing hub. Phili says President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement about the unbundling of the national power utility, has been heartening.
“As business, we were very, very encouraged with the President’s plan that he announced in the State of the Nation Address last week. However, these plans that the President announced are medium to long term. So the request that we have as business to government is – Please can we have immediate plans that the government can share with us that will ensure that there is an immediate stop to load-shedding; because we cannot sustain the load-shedding within the businesses any longer.”
