Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News, 2014-12-08

Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona has apologised to the nation for the recent load shedding saying the utility is trying to prevent a national blackout.

“We want to apologise to the nation for the inconvenience of the past few weeks due to load shedding.”

“The events were completely unexpected, especially on Thursday and Friday,” Matona told journalists in Johannesburg today.

The power utility implemented stage two blackouts on Thursday and stage three on Friday. Stage one allows for up to 1000MW of the national load to be shed, stage two for up to 2000MW and stage three for up to 4000MW.

Matona said Eskom was doing everything possible to manage the outages.

“It really pains us to have to load shed. We know the public is not pleased.”

He said a complete blackout would spell disaster for the country.

“We load shed out of responsibility… A complete blackout would be catastrophic and can take weeks to recover from.”

This spate of power cuts is the worst the country has experienced since the 2008 crisis which saw rolling blackouts implemented for months.

(Twitter: @Faizie143)