By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Ailing state power utility Eskom says that load shedding will be pushed back up to stage 5 on Monday following the failure of five generating units.
Stage 5 load shedding will be implemented from 16h00 on Monday (6 March) until 05h00 on Tuesday.
After that stage 4 load shedding will resume until further notice, Eskom said.
With load shedding pushed to stage 5 on Monday, president Cyril Ramaphosa will be announcing his new cabinet changes to a population largely in the dark.
The presidency has confirmed that Ramaphosa will be announcing the long-awaited changes, including introducing a new minister of electricity whose job it will be to deal with the ongoing load shedding and energy crisis.
Despite promising to deal with the energy crisis with urgency, the president has waited almost an entire month to introduce the minister.
In the meantime, the government has declared the crisis a national state of disaster and gazetted wide-reaching regulations that will empower various departments to fast-track new generation builds and deal with different aspects of the crisis.
To date, however, no such actions have been taken.
South Africa has experienced near-permanent load shedding, mostly at stage 4 or higher, since September 2022. Load shedding has been implemented for 127 consecutive days.