South African officials revoked the national state of disaster on Wednesday, despite the ongoing energy crisis.
The South African government has lifted the national state of disaster declared in February to deal with the crippling power outage.
Officials from the government announced that they will use existing legislation to reduce the impact of power outages.
The ongoing energy crisis in the country has crippled multiple sectors, including telecommunications services, which are struggling to keep phone networks operational.
“Our costs have gone through the rood,” lamented Sitho Mdalose, Vodacom’s South Africa managing director.
Operators such as MTN, Telkom, and Vodacom are spending millions of dollars to install solar panels, batteries, and test wind turbines in order to maintain network stability as Africa’s most advanced economy is forced to live in the dark for up to ten hours per day.
Numerous power outages have cost MTN nearly 640 million rand (36 million dollars) in service revenue over the last year, forcing it to lower its medium-term margin target.
Telkom has incurred additional costs totaling more than 150 million rand in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone.
