The Minister of Electricity and Energy, Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has assured South Africans that the country will overcome the current load shedding crisis by the end of the week.

The minister, along with Eskom executives, briefed the media on February 23 to provide an update on South Africa’s electricity generation performance. This follows Eskom’s announcement that it had implemented Stage 6 load shedding as of 1:30 am on February 23.

“I’m confident that by the end of the week, we should be out of this difficult situation. We are confident we’re going to return to normal conditions. By the end of the week, there will be no load shedding. We would have gone through this wave, and load shedding should be considered extremely abnormal,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister explained that despite 300 consecutive days of uninterrupted power supply, recent setbacks occurred, including the loss of five generation units at Majuba and four units at Camden power stations.

Eskom CEO Dan Marokane reported that out of the 10 lost units, six were back online. “We have five to six units planned to return to operation today, and we will reassess the situation after the evening peak. Our teams are focused on restoring these units,” Marokane said at the briefing in Pretoria.

He explained that multiple unit failures at Majuba Power Station were caused by an overload on a transformer. The situation worsened when a unit startup from a long-term outage triggered a domino effect, leading to supply cuts to other units.

“At Majuba, five units were lost, but by 6 am on Sunday, two had been brought back online, along with one unit at Camden. The remaining units will be restored soon,” Marokane said.

Marokane added that Eskom had identified the root cause of the issue and was working to prevent similar occurrences in the future. “We will be diving deeper into system design to ensure containment of such incidents and assess risks across our fleet,” he explained.

Government Apology
Ramokgopa apologized for the recent setback, emphasizing the government’s commitment to ending load shedding.

“On behalf of the government and Eskom leadership, I want to express our regret and apologize to the country for the load shedding crisis and its severity. The frustration and disappointment are understood, as we are working tirelessly to eradicate load shedding,” he said.

He dismissed claims of sabotage, stating that available evidence pointed to technical failures. “The evidence before us indicates this is a technical issue. We must not manufacture explanations or shift blame elsewhere,” he concluded.