Under-siege South Africans have little choice but to make contingency plans for possible load shedding until September 2.
There will be a high risk of load shedding for the next 30 days, Eskom said on Friday, as the power utility sets about undoing all the damage caused by strikes, Fin24 reported.
On Tuesday, the power utility instituted three hours of load shedding for the first time in a month, saying power-generation capacity shortfalls had been caused by the intimidation of workers and acts of sabotage. It has not instituted rotational power cuts since.
It said the work recovery teams would be involved in would include coal and diesel management, the maintenance and restarting of power plants, and environmental compliance, including ash management. It added that an improvement in generation could "only increase and be achieved with the return of employees".
Workers at Eskom’s three recognised unions – Solidarity, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) – have been in long-running wage negotiations with their employer.
These were recently moved to dispute resolution body the CCMA after direct talks remained deadlocked. Solidarity became the first union to accept Eskom’s wage offer on Thursday, with its chief executive Dirk Hermann pledging to "do everything to try and stabilise the power grid".
Numsa said on Friday it was taking Eskom’s latest offer back to its members, and would not share details with the media yet.
According to Bloomerg, Eskom offered to back down on its earlier refusal to pay employees a bonus, in addition to above-inflation wage increases.