In March South Africa was joking about load shedding. Now, not so much.

News analysis

Daily Sun

• Nine months ago we trawled Twitter for load-shedding jokes, and found some good ones, even if they tended towards the darkly bitter.
• With Eskom moving back into stage 4 blackouts on Monday, though, the national mood seems a lot more bleak this time around.
• We found many very, very angry people – but not many people in a joking mood.
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South Africa is no longer amused.

In March this year, as Eskom implemented rotational blackouts for lack of generating capacity, we rounded up some of the funniest reactions to load shedding on Twitter – and found plenty to chuckle at, even if the humour was somewhat black.But when we tried to repeat that same exercise this week, we came up short.

Where Twitter users did react to load shedding with something approaching humour, it was with very clear underlying frustration... 

... but even that was rare. More common were very blunt expressions of anger..

in various different flavours... 

... and variations.

An attempt by President Cyril Ramaphosa to address the issue on Monday morning did not find fertile ground.

(Compiled by Phillip de Wet)

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