As the country was plunged into Stage 4 load shedding on Monday afternoon, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the electricity crisis was a calamity that had hit the country.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the ANC’s “Thank you” rally held at the University of Joburg’s Soweto campus.
Ramaphosa told journalists that Eskom and it's issues was one of the main national crises that kept him up at night.
“If there's anything that keeps me awake at night, it's Eskom and the electricity issues,” said Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa’s comments on the electricity crisis facing the country follows rounds of load shedding announced by Eskom.
Earlier, the power utility announced that Stage 4 load shedding would be implemented from 1pm until 5am on Friday.
“Thereafter Stage 2 load shedding will continue as previously communicated until 5am on Saturday,” its statement read.
Ramaphosa meanwhile said the electricity crisis was an issue they were seriously looking into.
One of the major issues plaguing the power utility, according to Ramaphosa, was the fact that it was the only power generator in the country. He said Eskom needed to be restructured.
“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 admitted that some of the breakdowns were due to negligence and that when other power stations came in as emergency, they also broke down due to the overload.
"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," he said.
Political Bureau