The Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Eskom, Jan Oberholzer had made an assurance in a virtual briefing held on Tuesday, that South Africans are not anywhere close to a total blackout as it is been managed well and is also preventable.

Eskom has no doubt been struggling to keep the lights and power on since the first week of October. They, however, have increased the load shedding to stage 4 on Monday which has been downgraded to stage 2 until Friday.

Despite the Eskom power system’s obvious shortcomings, Jan Oberholzer says it is managed quite well, which means they would be able to prevent a total system blackout at all costs

“I don’t think we think we are on a brink of total system collapse. We have one of the best system operators in the world” Oberholzer said.

De Ruyter bemoaned the fact that they’re being fully blamed for the situation at Eskom, saying some of his predecessors should also be brought to book.

“Regrettably, from time to time, we have to implement load shedding in benchmarking the way we operate our system. But we can confidently say with the way we run the grid, I have every confidence to say we can avoid a total system blackout,“