Blom was speaking ahead of the president’s State of the Nation Address on Thursday.

He adds that the President cannot afford to dither on the opening up of the country’s grid to private power players. 

“I am hoping that the president will have to face up to Eskom to save South Africa. South Africa is bigger than Eskom. The president needs to indicate that he will open up the grid to everybody immediately and forget about this game of maintaining this monopolistic control and capping the grid players to 1 megawatt, 10 megawatts and now 50 megawatts. He needs to open up the grid to everyone. We don’t have to unbundle Eskom to open up the grid, it can happen today. 

“I just think that it is time that we get realistic with management at Eskom. All these false promises of Eskom saying two days of load-shedding and then we ending up with 20 is not acceptable.”

The country has been hit with rolling blackouts since the beginning of the year.

On Wednesday, Eskom implemented stage three load-shedding due to a constrained power system.

However, load-shedding has since been suspended ahead of Ramaphosa’s address. 

Jacaranda News