The municipality, home to Jacobsdal, Koffiefontein, Luckhoff, Oppermansgronde and Petrusburg, has in a statement stated its legal team will present the outcomes of the case and their strategy to it before a special council sitting in due course. No date has been announced for this special sitting as yet. 

On 9 March 2022, the SCA dealt Letsemeng a blow, chastising it for its, quote “disgraceful”, approach in dealing with its mammoth Eskom debt and promptly ordering it to settle the outstanding bill.

This account includes a R5 million advance which the Free State Provincial Government availed to the municipality at the eleventh hour in 2020. At the time, Eskom was threatening to plunge Letsemeng into the dark should a payment not be made. This amount is now a bone of contention between the two parties as outlined in the SCA judgment and the Free State municipality’s media release. Whilst the nation’s power regulator is of the view that Letsemeng vowed to make the payment in their 2020 agreement with Eskom, the municipality’s Manager, Tshemedi Mkhwane, says in a statement “that the matter will be taken up with the Free State's Finance Department”.

The Free State High Court Judge, Phillip Loubser, previously ruled that whilst the power utility could not continue to supply electricity without Letsemeng paying for it, the municipality had no funds with which to satisfy the debt. This remains the case for most of the municipalities in the country that owe Eskom collectively more than R44 billion.

Last week Eskom implemented Stage 4 load-shedding, total breakdowns took 15 439WM of generating capacity offline while another 5 505MW was down due to planned maintenance. The power outages were suspended on Monday.

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