Load shedding: Eskom will ‘destroy economy, increase unemployment’

With Eskom’s implementation of Stage 4 load shedding, and giving South Africans only 25 minutes to prepare, the Black Business Council’s (BBC) is calling for CEO Andre De Ruyter’s resignation.

Speaking to eNCA on Tuesday morning, BBC CEO 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:

He said the instability at Eskom is “costing the country a lot. It’s going to increase unemployment, 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”.

Watch: Black Business Council

This follows a statement released by the Black Business Council on Monday, saying Eskom’s leadership was “out of its depth”.

Matabane said the Eskom leadership is completely overwhelmed and inept, and “they simply don’t seem to be able to have a handle on this crisis”.

“As such, [they] should be let go as there appear to be no prospect in sight for any improvement of this serious situation”.

Stage 4 load shedding

The power utility announced on Monday at 12.35pm that due to generation capacity shortages, load shedding stage 4 would be implemented until 5am 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.” 

Meanwhile, former Transnet CEO Brian Molefe fears stage 6 may be a possibility.

ALSO READ: Will load shedding get better? It doesn’t seem likely

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.