Mbombela affected by nationwide power supply and demand challenges at Eskom, says municipality

Following the cloud of uncertainty that hung over Mbombela today, December 7, the silence from the City of Mbombela has been broken.

It released a statement earlier providing an explanation for the prolonged outage. Even though load-shedding was implemented, areas that are exempt from load-shedding also did not have electricity.

According to the statement “The ongoing implementation of stage 6 load-shedding by Eskom has also led to an increased scope of a load reduction programme which affected about 40 municipalities across the country that experienced this sudden addition of areas/substations that were not on the normal schedule.”

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It said Eskom had undertaken to investigate the prolonged outage.

It was earlier alleged that the power outage could possibly have been due to the enormous amount of money CoM owed Eskom, but the City denied this.

“CoM would like to set the record straight and indicate to consumers that the outage had nothing to do with its debt to Eskom. The city continues to service its account with Eskom as per the agreed payment plan.”

Linda Grimbeek, COO of the Kruger Lowveld Chamber of Business and Tourism, said that had the outage been for that reason, a notice would have been published by Eskom prior to the planned outage.

The City’s management apologised to its consumers for the extended outage “as it was not communicated by Eskom and is being investigated”.