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JOHANNESBURG. – As South Africa was plunged into Stage 4 load shedding on Monday afternoon, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the electricity crisis was a calamity that had hit the country.

He was speaking on the sidelines of the ANC’s “Thank you” rally held at the University of Joburg’s Soweto campus.

Mr Ramaphosa told journalists that Eskom and it’s issues was one of the main national crises that kept him up at night.

“If there’s anything that keeps me awake at night, it’s Eskom and the electricity issues.”

Mr Ramaphosa’s comments on the electricity crisis facing the country follows rounds of load shedding announced by Eskom.

As blackouts continued throughout the country, several passengers were yesterday stuck underground in the dark on the Gautrain.

One of the passengers said they were stuck underground for more than two hours.

Mr Ramaphosa meanwhile said the electricity crisis was an issue they were seriously looking into.

One of the major issues plaguing the power utility, according to Mr Ramaphosa, was the fact that it was the only power generator in the country. He said Eskom needed to be restructured.

“The direction we now need to move in is to restructure Eskom. We need to restructure it in a way that will enable us to have generation but that generation will be able to purchase generated electricity from others.” 

He admitted that some of the breakdowns were due to negligence and that when other power stations came in as emergency, they also broke down due to the overload.

“These are machines and they do break and the calamity of all calamities is what has visited us. These are the issues that we are focusing our attention on,” he said.

Eskom has announced the implementation of Stage 4 load shedding until 5am on Friday, and thereafter, Stage 2 load shedding would kick in until Saturday.

“Eskom regrets to inform the public that due to the ongoing generation capacity shortages, stage four load shedding will be implemented from 1pm until 5am on Friday. Thereafter, stage 2 load shedding will continue as previously communicated until 5am on Saturday,” the embattled power utility said in a statement on Monday afternoon.

“While Eskom regrets the escalation in load shedding, it is necessary to ration the remaining emergency generation reserves, which have been utilised extensively this morning as we are not getting the reduction in demand expected from the implementation of stage 2 load shedding.”

The power utility added that it was anticipated that an additional seven units would have returned to service by Monday, but that had not materialised.

“Further, a generating unit at Arnot power station tripped this morning, contributing to the shortages,” the statement added.

Eskom chief executive officer André de Ruyter said load shedding was set to be reduced to stage 3 from today and would be gradually reduced thereafter.

Speaking at a virtual media briefing yesterday afternoon, De Ruyter said a number of units had now come online.

“The outlook for load shedding is that we will reduce it to stage 3 from tomorrow at 5 am, this will be maintained until 5 am on Friday. And then we will maintain stage 2 load shedding until 5 am on Saturday, after which we intend to lift load shedding.”

Meanwhile, the ANC Youth League’s National Youth Task Team (NYTT) is calling for decisive action to be taken against the struggling executive leadership at Eskom.

In a strongly-worded statement, the NYTT criticised Eskom’s ability to keep the lights on, saying that for years there have been numerous turn-around strategies but no solution to the load shedding problem.

“We are at the mercy of sustained incompetence at the energy utility,” said the NYTT.

The task team said it had concluded that the executive leadership at Eskom did not take South Africans seriously and had no intention whatsoever to fix the country’s energy needs.

“This is emphasised by the sudden return of load shedding just as Grade 12 learners are writing their exams, when the greater part of our workforce is forced to work from home, and our national economy has been struggling to provide sustainable livelihoods to millions,“ the NYTT said. – Agencies