Kuni .G. Isaac
South Africa, has been afflicted by power outages from broken-down organizations and poor maintenance, situations worsened on Tuesday with the National Electricity Company declaring a drastic reduction in load.
South Africa’s National Electricity Company, Eskom, in a statement said that the immediate implementation of the load reduction for people and companies would result in a two- to four-hour daily power outage for each.
According to AFP from Johannesburg, this ranks the most severe power outage since December 2019. Of the eight levels intended for severe load reduction, South Africa, the continent’s first industrial power, has now reached level six, which is a critical level.
“There is a high risk that the load reduction phase will change in the coming days, depending on the condition of the power plants,” warned Eskom, who has also been affected by social wage disagreements at several power plants.
“Eskom was in this situation because of the unions’ actions, which prevented 90% of the employees of several power plants from performing their duties,” Provin Gordhan, South Africa’s Minister of State-owned enterprises, told a news conference.
The company stated a deal in standard with the unions and that the unions had asked their employees to resume work.
After ages of mismanagement and corruption, the state-owned company is unable to generate enough electricity for the country, where repeated protests against poor government services have multiplied.
South Africa gets 80 percent of its electricity from coal, which environmentalists say causes deadly pollution. The South African government was convicted in March of violating constitutional rights to breathe healthy air and was required to take action.
At the 26th Coup (UN Climate Change Summit) in Glasgow in November, the country received € 7.7 billion in loans and subsidies to finance the transition to clean energy.
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