After years of bold targets and billions in taxpayer funding, Eskom has failed to deliver on its own deadline to end loadshedding in South Africa — and the lights are still flickering.
Although Eskom has said that loadshedding won’t be seen during the winter months, the situation is still bleak.
By March 2025, the power utility was supposed to hit a 70% Energy Availability Factor (EAF), a key benchmark that determines how often its generating units are functional and supplying electricity. That milestone would have been the turning point: no more blackouts, a stable grid, and relief for citizens and businesses alike. Instead, South Africa got a hard truth – the country’s EAF now stands at just 56.43%, lower than where it was a year ago, as per Daily Investor.
This isn’t just a missed deadline. It’s a collapse of Eskom’s highly publicised Generation Recovery Plan – a strategy that former Eskom chair Mpho Makwana promised in early 2023 would take just two years to complete.
Board members and Public Enterprises officials set specific EAF goals for 2023 (60%), 2024 (65%), and 2025 (70%), but Eskom never reached even the first target.
Despite this, the utility’s leadership team used their 2025 Winter Outlook media briefing to celebrate ‘improved reliability’ and ‘enhanced performance.’
Eskom CEO Dan Marokane went as far as to say that power was available ‘96% of the time’ this past financial year, offering no clear explanation for the continued blackouts or missed EAF targets.
‘South Africans deserve credit for their patience — not Eskom,’ energy analyst Chris Yelland told ENCA. ‘If we measure success by promises made, Eskom should be thriving. But if we measure it by results, they’re failing the public miserably.’
The reality on the ground tells a different story than Eskom’s self-congratulations. Loadshedding alerts continue to hit phones on a weekly basis, backup generators remain a daily necessity, and diesel spending has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels. Treasury figures show Eskom has burned through more than R30 billion on diesel alone over the past two years to keep the grid marginally functional.
Compounding the issue is Eskom’s refusal to directly address the broken 70% target. When questioned about the failure during the May 2025 briefing, executives skirted the issue entirely, offering vague responses or pivoting to unrelated metrics.
‘This is classic deflection,’ said economist Duma Gqubule. ‘We’ve seen it before — public enterprises patting themselves on the back while performance metrics tank.’
And while Eskom maintains that its recovery plan is still in motion, many experts argue that the absence of accountability has become part of the institution’s DNA. In the meantime, citizens are still stockpiling candles and inverters, while small businesses count their losses in cold storage and missed work hours.
As winter begins, Eskom may have improved operational systems slightly — but its greatest outage might be trust.
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