Eskom’s recent announcement that it has marked the longest stretch of uninterrupted power supply in five years has been met with heavy criticism by many South Africans living in disenfranchised areas.
Last week, the Sate-owned power utility claimed that load shedding has been suspended for more than 240 consecutive days. This, Eskom stated, has resulted in savings of some R16.33 billion in diesel costs.
However, there is large section of the public that believes Eskom has simply implemented what it calls “load reduction” which is just a new term for load shedding only targeting black townships and rural areas, while white suburbs enjoy uninterrupted power supply.
Political Analyst Gugulethu Hughes has, on several occasions, argued that there is no generational improvement happening at Eskom as a result of adherence to engineering principles, adding: “It is a lie that the current Eskom leadership is making any improvements”.
Hughes explained that what is being done is “PR on steroids” intended to make the public believe that the so called GNU era is functioning.
On the other hand, the government said load reduction is a result of network overloading issues in certain local areas due to illegal connections, vandalism, meter tampering, unauthorised network operations, theft of network equipment, and purchasing electricity from unlicensed vendors.
To prevent the risk of network overloading, Eskom has urged its customers to report illegal connections.
READ MORE: 880 SANDF members deployed to protect Eskom power stations.
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