African National Congress (ANC) President Cyril Ramaphosa says he is confident the intermittent power outages being experienced by Eskom will be resolved by this weekend.
Eskom was implementing stage four load-shedding after it lost a large part of its generating capacity. The power utility has announced that the country will be moving to stage three from 9pm tonight, reduced to stage two from 5am Saturday.
Ramaphosa has downplayed concerns that sabotage of Eskom may have been the cause of load shedding.
He was speaking to journalists while campaigning for the governing ANC in Thokoza, east of Johannesburg, ahead of Monday’s local government elections.
Eskom has plunged the country into the dark and many South Africans are unhappy.
The ANC is also not happy saying its government will be harshly judged at the polls by Eskom’s failure to keep the lights on. In its statement earlier this week, the governing party suspected sabotage. But speaking on the side-lines of his campaign in Ekurhuleni on Thursday, Ramaphosa said the intermittent power outages are not intentional. He has assured South Africans that this problem would be solved by the weekend.
And on whether heads will roll in his cabinet or at Eskom, he said, for now, his obsession is getting power restored insisting the rest will follow. This comes at a time when there is mounting pressure on him to fire Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan together with the Eskom Board.
Ramaphosa said the grand solution to the Eskom crisis is opening up the market for Independent Power Producers.
On Wednesday, during a briefing with Gordhan regarding the latest power outages, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter outlined the reasons behind the load shedding across the country.
He said that the securing of power reserves ahead of election day was among the factors that necessitated the current load shedding.
De Ruyter on preserving capacity for election day:
Meanwhile, the ANC president will wrap up his party’s election campaign with the national Siyangqoba rally scheduled for Thokoza Park in Soweto on Friday evening.
The activities will start with Ramaphosa addressing the gathering at seven.
