Minister of electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says the current load shedding is momentary and should not be regarded as permanent.

Ramokgopa has assured South Africans that the country should be out of the "difficult” position by the end of the week.

Ramokgopa was addressing a media briefing on Sunday, hours after the power utility Eskom announced the return of load shedding after multiple power-generating units tripped. He said the country will eventually get into a position of no load shedding.

Ramokgopa said on Saturday, Eskom lost 3,000 megawatts at a go which triggered a series of events.

This, then resulted in stage 3 load shedding being implemented.

"We were on stage three when we slept last night and then we had another incident at Camden at 1.30am [on Sunday] when we lost four units. The constellation of that resulted in us upping the stage from 3 to 6,” he said.

Ramokgopa, however, assured the country that there was no sabotage.

"There is no sabotage based on what is before us, we can explain what went wrong and it is something that we are addressing,” he said.

"I want to say to the rest of the country, the evidence that is before us is that this is a technical issue. I am making this point because we must not find any reasons to manufacture explanations of why we are at stage 6 and point fingers somewhere else,” he said.

Ramokgopa said he was confident that by the end of the week, "we should be out of this difficult situation”.

He also said there would be moments of setbacks but that Eskom took "full responsibility and we take full accountability”.

Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said out of the 10 units they had lost, six were back online.

He said the loss of multiple units at the Majuba power station was occasioned by an overload on a transformer.

Marokane said when they checked the situation at Majuba on Saturday, it coincided with the trip to Medupi power station. 

At Majuba, Eskom said it lost five units and has already brought two back by 6am on Sunday, and one at Camden and would proceed up to Tuesday to bring the rest of the units back into operation.