Eskom said Zambia suffering nationwide power outages at the weekend was as a result of multiple issues in the “interconnected” network across Southern Africa.

By early Saturday afternoon, power had been restored in parts of the capital, Lusaka, as well as the southern, western and central provinces, according to a statement from Hazel Zulu, a spokesperson for power authority Zesco.

Investigations to establish the cause of the loss of generation are under way, she said. 

A significant part of the country was hit by a partial blackout early last month after a failure at the Kariba power station which affected operations of Konkola Copper Mines and other producers of the metal.

But this outage was one of the reasons why SA was hit by higher levels of load-shedding.

Giving an update on Tuesday, Segomotso Choche, Eskom’s outage manager, said the outage was a culmination of a number of small incidents. He explained that all the networks in Southern Africa were interconnected, and operated at a frequency of 50 Hertz.

“If the frequency goes too high or low it may result in tripping. We have interconnections between SA, Botswana and into Zimbabwe, and between Zimbabwe and Zambia. The incident was a culmination of a number of small incidents.

What we are sharing is preliminary. What we know is that Zambia experienced a blackout over the weekend, a lot of power flowed into Zambia, 54htz, and a number of generators tripped. The tie-line between Zimbabwe and Zambia also tripped.

“When the interconnector tripped it had an impact in Zimbabwe, leading to generators tripping. When this incident occurred we were already in stage 2 load-shedding and had a couple of incidents on our emergency reserves,” Choche said.

Meanwhile, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said on Tuesday that he was not going to be stepping down, despite growing criticism of ongoing load-shedding across SA.

The Black Business Council and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) have been among the most vocal critics calling for De Ruyter to resign.

But speaking at a briefing on Tuesday, De Ruyter said there had been no conversations between himself and the parastatal's board regarding him leaving.

“I do not intend to resign of my own accord.”

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