@genxian Stage 8 means we're without power for, on average, 12 hours per day (not consecutively, but during the course of the day, we're off for a total of 12 hours).

Stage 9 would entail even more than that.

Currently, South Africa is on Stage 6. The highest theoretical level is currently Stage 8. Officially, we've never been on Stage 8 load shedding, although some people say we have but they just never admitted it to us.

@genxian We've had load shedding (planned, rolling blackouts to protect the grid) in some form or other since 2007.

In a nutshell, it's because we don't have enough power to supply the whole country. Our power plants are aging and haven't been properly maintained, and there's no money to build new ones. Corruption is rife, there have been allegations of organised criminal syndicates deliberately damaging the grid for various reasons, and everyone's got their own ideas about the what the root cause is as how to solve it.

I think this article gives a pretty good explanation, depending on how much detail you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

@genxian Thanks. Yeah, we could always do with prayers.

As far as people doing okay goes, the sucky thing is that this is just further widening the gap between the rich and poor. Because everybody has the most expensive backup system they can afford:

Some have full solar solutions and are completely (or almost completely) off the grid
Some have inverter systems that can keep their households running during load shedding
Some have petrol or diesel generators
Some have small UPSes with enough juice to keep their Fibre routers alive so they can at least continue to use the Internet