Eskom says some municipalities have not been implementing rolling blackouts and this has contributed to the power utility moving to stage 4 power cuts.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter says letters have been drafted to all the affected municipalities to correct the situation with all future blackout scenarios which may occur.
He says the municipalities which Eskom supplies have not fulfilled rolling blackout requirements apart from eThekwini and Buffalo City.
De Ruyter says blackouts will be reduced to stage 3 from Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock, stage 2 will be implemented from 5’clock on Friday until blackouts are lifted on Saturday.
“During stage two load shedding we saw a number of municipalities either not abiding by their obligations to implement load shedding or implementing it only on a fractional basis of what their commitment should be. This has put us in a position instead of what the roughly 2000mw that we would expect from load shedding stage two that we had to deepen our load shedding to stage four.”
Eskom briefing on rolling blackouts:
Meanwhile, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) is calling for De Ruyter and its COO to be axed.
Numsa is also calling for the Eskom board to step down. The union says the implementation of blackouts do not make sense.
Numsa says the current leadership at Eskom is failing the country.
The union is also rejecting a proposal made by the DA calling for further privatisation of the power utility.
