President Thabo Mbeki is to meet the management of electricity utility Eskom to ascertain the depth of the current power-supply crisis and the company’s remedial plans, the Presidency said on Saturday.
”The president’s intervention will complement discussions in which Minister of Minerals and Energy Buyelwa Sonjica is already engaged with Eskom,” presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga said.
He said Mbeki will table the matter before the forthcoming Cabinet lekgotla (meeting) that begins in Pretoria on Tuesday, ending on Thursday, he said.
On Friday, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) said Eskom must provide answers about the ongoing electricity crisis. The SAHRC said it and the Public Protector could soon work together in an investigation to establish why Eskom had instituted such severe power cuts.
Earlier in the week, Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana had sent a letter to Eskom saying he was considering investigating the power cuts because they were having a devastating effect on service delivery by the government.
The SAHRC said: ”The commission is concerned about news reports that load-shedding as is currently being implemented by Eskom is negatively affecting the provision of essential services and, by extension, human rights.”
In a letter to the Public Protector, the commission said it was compelled to make its concerns known about the negative effects of the deliberate power cuts on the enjoyment of human rights.
In particular, it said access to information would enable people to enjoy their economic and social rights, and that the information was inaccessible to most people over the internet.
”It is clear that Eskom is not providing adequate, accurate and timeous information to consumers to allow them to plan their lives and businesses around the load-shedding schedule,” said the SAHRC.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said it shared in the people’s anger at the disruption to their lives and the economic fall-out regarding the power cuts.
”It has become a serious national embarrassment and could have a major impact on economic growth and job creation,” said Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven.
Meanwhile, the acting leader of the Independent Democrats, Simon Grindrod, has called for Eskom to lure back the skills it had lost.
On Friday, he cited ”the loss of engineers, project managers and other highly skilled employees as one of the main reasons for the current crisis at national power supplier Eskom”.
Power cuts were expected to continue over the weekend and into the coming week, Eskom said in a statement on Friday. There was a ”high possibility of load shedding over the weekend as the electricity system was extremely tight”, the utility warned. — Sapa