President Ramaphosa: ‘Eskom is keeping me awake at night’

President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged that the situation at Eskom is a major crisis, but adds that they are seriously looking into it.

Ramaphosa made the remarks on the sidelines of the ANC’s “Thank you” rally held at the University of Joburg’s Soweto campus on Monday, 8 November 2021.

He says the issues plaguing the power utility, mainly the struggle to keep the lights on, has been weighing heavily on his mind.

“If there’s anything that keeps me awake at night, it’s Eskom and the electricity issues,” Ramaphosa said.

It comes as Eskom moved to escalate load shedding to stage 4 on Monday afternoon until Friday morning at 05:00. South Africans are now up in arms over the rolling blackouts and are demanding answers as to when things at the embattled parastatal will improve. Eskom has attributed the latest bout of load shedding to a need to ration the remaining emergency generation reserves, which were utilised extensively on Monday morning. The utility’s spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha says this is because they are not getting the reduction in demand as expected from the implementation of stage 2, which had been implemented before.

RAMAPHOSA: ESKOM MUST BE RESTRUCTURED

President Cyril Ramaphosa adds that Eskom needed to be restructured and also says some of the breakdowns were due to negligence.

“The direction we now need to move in is to restructure Eskom. We need to restructure it in a way that will enable us to have generation but that generation will be able to purchase generated electricity from others,” Ramaphosa said.

He says one of the biggest problems with the power situation in the country is that it is still largely reliant on a single generator of electricity, which is Eskom.

“These are machines and they do break and the calamity of all calamities is what has visited us. These are the issues that we are focusing our attention on,” 

President Cyril Ramaphosa