It has now become fairly routine to have power cuts in South Africa these days. The countries power utility, Eskom, has for the last couple of weeks been warning the public that there will be continued load shedding across the country due to maintenance work being carried out on their plants. For how long can this ‘maintenance’ work they say they are doing carry on before it seriously affects businesses?

‘What is the main problem’ is my question? Are Eskom actually doing maintenance work or is there just not enough power in the country to meet the demand? I think it is a combination of the two. Now reading an article today on Fin24 titled What next for Eskom? The article raises another interesting point that states that a shortage of skilled workers in South Africa could affect Eskom’s expansion plans. Now its clear Eskom need to expand their infrastructure in order to meet the demand for electricity in South Africa. Now if the you can not find the right people to aid in this expansion then you are fighting a loosing battle. So without skilled workers there can not be any expansion, therefore we will continue to have electricity problems. One does not have to look far to see how electricity shortages can affect an economy, look at South Africa’s neighbour Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s economy has virtually shrunk to being non-existent and a large contributing factor to that has been the lack of electricity. Everyone needs electricity for something or the other.

Eskom had proposed to increase its tariffs by 18% in order to help finance their expansion. This planned tariff hike has not gone down well with the consumers at it would further fuel the rate of inflation in South Africa, higher inflation will mean higher interest rates. It is clear Eskom need a lot of money for their expansion and the only place they seem set to get this money from is by increasing their tariffs. An 18% increase in electricity tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy.

One wonders if there is ‘any light at the end of the tunnel’ for all of this or is South Africa set to enter even darker days?

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