Eskom ‘concern’ prompts Ramaphosa to cut international trip short

President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to touch down in South Africa on Monday, cutting his planned trip to New York short, to attend to Eskom’s worsening situation.

Stage 6 load shedding was implemented early on Sunday morning, an unexpected blow to South Africans already trying to cope with previous planned outages.

Ramaphosa concerned

Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told eNCA the electricity status in the country was “alarming” to Ramaphosa, especially in light of the commitments made to the nation to fix the ongoing energy crisis and embattled power utility Eskom.

Also Read: Stage 6 load shedding: Here’s how we got here

Magwenya said Ramaphosa wanted to understand what led to the tripping of a generation unit each at Kusile and Kriel power stations.

He emphasised that no one expected yet another bout of load shedding, let alone an escalation to stage 6.

Ramaphosa earlier this week departed to the US to build relations and engage in political talks of mutual interest, and to the UK to pay his respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Earlier on Sunday, he arrived in the UK ahead of her funeral procession on Monday.

He was due to address the United Nations General Assembly next week, but has opted instead to fly home.

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Patience with Eskom running out

Just days ago, Ramaphosa pleaded for patience with Eskom, and committed to obtaining the much-needed 4 000 megawatts of power required to stabilise the grid.

“So, until we get to that point, the challenges that Eskom is facing will keep hitting us and fortunately, they are not continuous, they keep recovering the units that fail from time-to-time, but the investors understand the challenges and understand where we are,” he said.

The president said Eskom’s challenges were being addressed within the 10-point electricity crisis strategy, which he announced recently. In July, Ramaphosa said Eskom would add new generation capacity “on an urgent basis”.

South Africa has currently installed generation capacity of 46 000MW, however, only 60% is available at any given time due to maintenance and unplanned outages.

This means that there’s an electricity shortage of up to 6 000MW.

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