WATCH: ‘Somebody didn’t want Kusile and Medupi to be finished’ – Mbeki

As the country battles the energy crisis and relentless load shedding, former President Thabo Mbeki has questioned the shocking state of South Africa’s power stations suggesting that the delay in completing the Kusile Power Station is a “deliberate and conscious decision”.

Mbeki raised the questions during an interview with veteran SABC journalist Sophie Mokoena on Thursday.

Watch the interview with former president Thabo Mbeki

Load shedding

South Africa has been battling to keep the lights on with prolonged daily outages which has severely impacted the businesses and the country’s fragile economy.

With winter about to set in, Eskom last week warned that load shedding may hit stage 8 during the colder periods.

ALSO READ: Stage 8 load shedding hits SA and it’s likely to get worse

Who is blocking the effectiveness of power stations?

Mbeki claimed there must be someone who is “deliberately trying to block” the effectiveness of South Africa’s power stations.

The former president did not disclose who the “somebody” was.

He said a decision was taken during the State of the Nation Address in 2004 that Eskom must build new power stations.

“Those power stations were Kusile and Medupi. We have not finished Kusile up to now. That is 19 years later. How do you explain that? Somebody needs to look at that in a focused way. How do you explain this, you can’t take 19 years to finish a power station.

It is because somebody did not want the power station to be finished. Deliberate conscious, so we must find out that in order to move.

Weekend load shedding

Meanwhile, ailing state-owned-entity Eskom said stage 5 load shedding will be implemented from 4pm on Friday afternoon until 5am on Saturday.

Thereafter, various stages of the rolling blackouts will be implemented over the weekend.

Eskom crisis communication manager Menzi Mngomezulu said the utility will publish another update if there are any significant changes.

According to data tracked by Outlier, South Africa has experienced almost three hundred days of deliberate power cuts from 2022 to 2023.

ALSO READ: Eskom pushes load shedding to stage 5 ahead of weekend – here’s the schedule