NATIONAL NEWS - With Eskom’s implementation of Stage 4 load shedding, – and giving South Africans only 25 minutes to prepare – the Black Business Council (BBC) is calling for CEO Andre De Ruyter’s resignation.
Speaking on to eNCA on Tuesday morning, the BBC’s Kganki Matabane said the “council is not unreasonable, it just needs certainty”.
Eskom’s instability detrimental
De Ruyter must go, says BBC
Matabane says South Africans are unsure of when to expect outages as Eskom implements power cuts at short notice. Matabane adds:
“So if you don’t know if there will be electricity or not, you cant plan your lives.”
He said the instability at Eskom is “costing the country a lot; it’s going to increase unemployment and the economy will never grow”.
“Businesses and ordinary South Africans are not able to plan their lives because everyone relies on the supply of electricity”.
Stage 4 load shedding
The power utility announced on Monday at 12:35 that due to generation capacity shortages, load shedding stage 4 would be implemented until 05:00 on Friday.
The previous plan was for the country to have stage 2 load shedding from Monday until 5am on Saturday.
“[Load shedding] is necessary to ration the remaining emergency generation reserves, which have been utilised extensively as we are not getting the reduction in demand as expected from stage 2.”
Why load shedding again?
According to Eskom, “a major incident” occurred in Zambia on Saturday which affected the entire Southern African Power Pool.
“During this incident, the imported power from Cahora Bassa reduced by 1 000MV while a Tutuka generator also tripped.”
“Furthermore, a unit Tutuka power station was forced to shut down while there were further delays in returning a unit in each at Lethabo and Majuba power stations,” the statement read.
The power utility problems worsened when Medpudi and Matla power stations also tripped.
