Ramaphosa plans more steps to ease Eskom crisis

The South African government has held urgent meetings to find ways to ease record rolling blackouts, with state-owned power utility Eskom Holdings having already announced some of the measures, President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his weekly letter to the nation.

The country has endured a record six days of 6 000 megawatt power cuts, known in South Africa as stage 6 loadshedding, and a total of 106 days of outages, according to Bloomberg calculations.

“We will remain seized with this issue until the situation is resolved,” Ramaphosa said in his letter, without detailing any extra steps his government is prepared to take to prop up the electricity grid. “The severe load shedding of the last few days has reminded us how unstable our aging power stations are. It has given greater urgency to the measures we announced two months ago to stabilise our electricity supply.”

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