The Eastern Cape has the highest amount of working hours lost at more than 7 900. Mpumalanga lost 5 990 hours, while Gauteng lost 4 621 working hours.
This was revealed by the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, replying to a Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary question on the total hours lost in each province due to load shedding.
DA MP, Christopher Roos, who posed the question, says this is an alarming number of working hours lost, and is a concern for service delivery.
“This despite for tens of million of rands being spent on equipment upgrade, communication upgrades at Home Affairs offices. And the minister of Home Affairs needs to start pretending to care for our people at least, and head to the DA’s request to have the system down-time status displayed on the Home Affairs website so that while at least they try to sort the issue out, that people will not have to waste their time travelling all the way to the offices, especially in places like the Eastern Cape where the issue is worse by far than any province. So people do not have to waste their time always travelling there only to find out that the system is off line and they will have to travel back and come again.”