Load shedding: Eskom shifts blame for Gauteng power cuts

Eskom on Thursday said maintenance teams were attending to the increased electricity-supply interruptions in Gauteng.

Residents are encouraged to log faults on Eskom’s self-help portals or use Alfred the chatbot.

Eskom’s customer services manager, Daphne Mokwena, wants to assure customers the outages are being prioritised and will be restored “as speedily as possible”.

Darkness in Gauteng

Unplanned power cuts

Customers across the provinces are experiencing unplanned power cuts as a result of “multiple network faults exacerbated by network overloading”.

Other reasons for the outages include “illegal connections, meter bypasses, cable theft, vandalism and unauthorised operations on the electricity infrastructure”, Eskom said.

“We would like to apologise to our customers for the inconvenience and appeal to your patience as we work on restoring supply.”

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No load shedding on election day

Eskom does not expect this weekend’s special voting process and voting day on Monday to be hampered by load shedding.

Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan on Wednesday said the power utility would be bringing back at least 2,000MW of electricity online by Thursday.

He said the current stage 4 system would also be downgraded to level three for the municipal elections.

“Over the weekend, load shedding will stop, which means that as South Africans go to the polls and as the counting of votes continues on Monday and over the next few days, there will be no load shedding, unless there is an unexpected event.”