ESKOM CRISIS
…Ramaphosa cuts overseas trip short and will return to SA after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral
JOHANNESBURG - President Cyril Ramaphosa will head back to South Africa immediately after Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral to deal with the load shedding crisis.
“The President will no longer be travelling to New York from London. Instead, he will head home to deal with current Stage 6 load shedding,” Presidency spokesperson Vincent Ngwenya said.
Ramaphosa held a virtual meeting on Sunday with the “relevant” government ministers and officials for information on why so many units tripped and what could be done immediately to resolve the situation.
“This was in between attending to the lying in state of Her Majesty and the King’s reception on Sunday.”
Ramaphosa will head home directly after the funeral.
Eskom has considered instituting permanent load shedding, but has decided against it for now.
On Sunday, Eskom chief executive officer André de Ruyter said the utility had considered continuous load shedding and to “normalise” it at Stage 2, instead of introducing it when the power system faces a crunch.
This would give Eskom more scope to plan for maintenance.
However, the utility found that nonstop load shedding at low levels wouldn’t add “significant additional” headroom for doing maintenance, and decided not to opt for it.
“We have debated (permanent load shedding) extensively internally. In a certain way, the planned maintenance we carry out contributes to load shedding because it is capacity that we plan to take off the grid,” De Ruyter said. In the end, however, Eskom decided against it, he said. – NEWS24.
When President Ramaphosa gets back from London after cutting his trip abroad short to deal with the load shedding crisis, he will be returning to a grumpy nation.
“If I did not need my phone every day, I probably would have thrown it this morning when I saw that message,” said Claremont resident Kayla Alexandra when she woke up yesterday to Eskom’s crisis message that load shedding was escalated to Stage 6. – NEWS24.