Mayor of Johannesburg Mpho Moerane lashed out at Eskom in a scathing letter after the power utility implemented stage 2 loadshedding.
Joburg mayor considers legal action against Eskom
South Africa’s been plunged into rotational power cuts since Friday 22 October 2021, and the outlook for the week ahead does not promise an end to the outages.
In its latest update, the power utility confirmed that while loadshedding has been suspended at the start of the work week, it will pick up again from 21:00 until 05:00 and resume again in the same period on Tuesday evening.
“Kusela Unit 1 tripped on Sunday morning as a result of a fault on a feed water pump, which is on the secondary plant. The plant was shut down in accordance with standard plant operating procedures and all parameters are stable,” the power utility said.
For the City of Johannesburg, whose City Power recently entered into a cooperative agreement with Eskom to sell or transfer the distribution of electricity in the parts of Johannesburg currently supplied by the national power supplier, the extension of loadshedding at stage 2 goes against their memorandum of understanding (MoU).
In a statement, the City of Joburg made it clear that it does not intend to comply with Eskom’s stage 2 schedule, especially since “the City recently secured additional power supply capacity of 220MW from the privately-owned Kelvin Power Station that qualifies it for an exemption from stages 1 and 2 of loadshedding.”
Moreover, the City claims Eskom was shown proof of the additional capacity transfer before the stage 2 loadshedding extension was announced this weekend, and nothing was heard from the utility.
In Moerane’s view, this is an indication that “Eskom has no intention of serving the people of Johannesburg.”
“If how Eskom treats the City is anything to go by, then it is understandable why Johannesburg residents have so many complaints about the national utility’s customer service. Therefore, the City is now prepared to go the legal rout to halt Eskom’s blanket heavy-handedness against the people of Johannesburg, especially those whose Eskom accounts are up to date,” the mayor warned.