【Ferro-alloys.com】This comes in the wake of a fresh bout of power cuts that are expected to persist for parts of the week.

Stage 2 load shedding was suspended on Sunday night but is expected to make a dreaded return on Monday evening, owing to a shortage in generation capacity.

De Ruyter told journalists on Monday that heads would roll.

"We are going to be taking consequence management against power station management. We are not satisfied, at all, with the performance of some of our senior executives.

"We are not going to be tolerating poor performance and that we will be taking appropriate action against underperforming people who do not live up to their duty, both to Eskom and to 60 million South Africans."

It remains unclear which power stations are in hot water.

"As soon as they have been informed, we will be able to give you more news flow on that," De Ruyter added.

According to De Ruyter, top management at the power station would also shoulder some of the blame.

"It's a question of taking accountability. If I weren't, I would not be sitting here explaining to the nation what is going on with our system.

"The buck stops with me and that is why I take accountability and that is why I'm sitting in this rather uncomfortable chair at the moment, apologising to the nation," he said.

Eskom's woes are not believed to have been caused by acts of sabotage.

"We have no conclusive evidence of sabotage at all, and I think one should refrain from speculating about sabotage without such evidence.

"One should not fall prey to the temptation of blaming sabotage when we have not adequately addressed issues like management and skills and how we conduct outages, the issues that we've raised so far."

• [Editor:zhaozihao]