No guarantee lights will be on tomorrow

IT REMAINS unclear where South Africans will be able to watch the Springboks take on the Japanese in the Rugby World Cup quarter-final tomorrow, without any power cuts.

Eskom, could not say yesterday if Sunday would be load shedding-free; they would only know today. This after they announced that there would be stage 1 rolling blackouts for Saturday between 9am and 11pm.

On Thursday, Eskom’s acting CEO, Jabu Mabuza, said Eskom wasn’t expecting load shedding at the weekend. However, yesterday Eskom admitted that the national grid had become further strained after they lost Medupi 3, 4, and 5 due to coal and ash handling problems. This had created an additional shortage of 1 500 megawatts of electricity, forcing the power utility to maintain stage 2 load shedding.

Energy expert Ted Blom, however, warns that South Africans are likely to see far more load-shedding events in the future. “It is going to get worse, at least for the next five years,” he said.

This as Eskom tries to deal with serious design defects in the Kusile and Medupi power stations and, he says, continues to use sub-standard coal in their boilers. The failure of a conveyor belt at Medupi has been blamed for triggering load shedding this week.

To sort out all of Eskom’s woes will end up costing the taxpayer R1.7trillion, according to Blom.

Another concern, he said, was Eskom’s reserve margins, which were dangerously low. “It is irresponsible for Eskom to run the grid with a 5% safety margin; the global standard is 15%. We are heading for a grid meltdown,” he said.

LIKE a bad dream, load-shedding entered the lives of South Africans again this week, breaking previous promises that the last time would be the final one.

Alas, it was not to be.

The power utility is fast becoming a bottomless pit into which billions of rand that we can ill afford – that should and could have been spent on countless other projects if we had had the money – are apparently being extorted from us at will, because the alternative is simply too ghastly to contemplate.

But where does the spin end and the truth begin?

The New Dawn is a year-anda-half old, we keep being told that everything is working until it’s not, and we are literally plunged into darkness.

Amid the ever-shifting goalposts of PR excuses, we are told the utility is ridiculously over-staffed, yet inefficient and arrogantly resistant to any meaningful intervention.

There is a disconnect which is only becoming worse.

If it’s not tropical cyclones, it’s maintenance.

The government wants to grow the economy, yet each time power is cut, tens of thousands of small businesses – the job drivers of the short- to middle-term – are forced ever closer to the abyss of financial ruin as the big employers see their profitability plummet and start looking at cutting even more jobs, while hiking the costs of the products they sell.

All the while, the elephant in the room remains: Eskom’s growing debt pile that needs to be serviced in an economy that is forever on the threshold of recession.

Ramaphosa will find out very soon there is a limit to the patience of international lenders and the long-suffering South African consumers.

He will have to act resolutely and quickly for this apparently intractable mess not to define him as much as the theft of a nation’s birthright defined his predecessor.