Load shedding is becoming a common occurrence in South Africa, but have you ever stopped to think about who is responsible for turning the lights on and off? One man, @mandisidyantyi, took to TikTok to share a video of himself working at a power plant in Rustenburg, revealing the dangerous conditions under which load shedding is implemented.

 

 

 

 

 
The video quickly went viral, with over 3.6 million views and 125,000 comments from shocked South Africans. I’m sure Eskom officers will be very proud that they control the discharge of electricity to over 50 million people and feel like god’s when they turn off the switch. But do you actually know how load shedding works?

According to News24, implementing power outages in South Africa involves several steps: municipalities split their areas into blocks, each assigned a fixed period of power outage and a unique code specifying their load shedding pattern. Municipal officials then make their tables public, letting people know when their lights will go out. These databases are periodically updated to avoid permanently assigning a single block to a single loa