By Daanyaal Matthews

Eskom has come under fire after rumours that the State-Owned enterprise had implemented stage 8 loadshedding sporadically over the past week.

Additional scrutiny has been placed on the State-Owned Enterprise after the continued habit of loadshedding being suspended over certain public holidays such as the Easter Weekend which has triggered questions on whether Eskom is prioritizing optics and public approval over effectively dealing with the energy crisis.

Speaking on Ramadaan AM, Daphne Mokwena, Operations and Maintenance Manager at Eskom, responded to the question of why loadshedding was suspended over the long weekends by saying:

“The goal for Eskom is not to implement loadshedding at all, however, we will implement loadshedding when there really is a need to keep the grid stable. However, what we have experienced as well, especially during the long weekends, the two long weekends we had in March, what we saw was that demand as well, we don’t know if it’s because people have gone on holiday, our demand has dropped considerably. Obviously that demand led to us not to load shed because supply obviously improved, our generators also improved in terms of the breakdown, however the most important thing that we saw was demand went down.”

In response to the rumours of stage 8 loadshedding, Mokwena added , “I think we’d like to mention, I’m not sure whichever journalist that really pronounced this or mentioned that we went to stage 8. I think it just misleads the nation because as you’d know every time, we increase a stage or decrease a stage we do inform the nation where we are. Just to answer your question we have never went to stage 8, the highest stage we have been at is stage 6, and as you would know we are currently at stage 5.”

Ms. Mokwena has elaborated that Eskom has instituted Stage 5 for the remainder of the week, however, at 4pm, loadshedding schedule will return to stage 6 with this pattern remaining until further notice.