Economist Mike Schussler has warned that the country will continue to lose jobs if load shedding persists.
Eskom has announced that stage two load shedding will continue until five o’clock on Saturday morning. A number of ageing power stations in the country are offline.
However, the power utility says the 12 generating units that are expected to be brought back online this week could help to stabilise the grid.
Schussler says South Africa could lose 350 000 jobs this year. He says it has already lost a million jobs due to the rolling blackouts.
Schussler explains what method he used to calculate the job losses: “We can see from the amount of electricity which was not available that our growth in job creation has stopped. Based on that as a trend and the actual jobs lost, we do know that we have probably lost well over a million jobs because of not being able to implement projects. The mines do use a lot of electricity and that’s where we also see non-expansion.”
City power
The power utility has attributed this to several breakdowns of generating units – at Tutuka, Kendal and Matimba.
Worse shape
CEO of Independent Energy Thought Leaders, Mike Rossouw, says Eskom is in worse shape than ever.
He says South Africans should ready themselves for more load shedding and for longer.
Rossouw says the government has to make some politically tough decisions, or Eskom will collapse, taking the economy with it.
In the video below, Rossouw is being interviewed:
