South Africa is currently experiencing a major electricity shortage and, Eskom, the national supplier of electricity, has resorted to a rationing system, cutting off power in one region in order to make electricity available to another region.

This way every everyone gets to experience outages at some time during the day or night. Every power cut lasts from two to three hours and over the past ten days we have experienced up to three cuts a day. This problem is expected to continue for the next seven years which is when the government hopes to have built additional power stations.

From our side we are taking the necessary action to deal with the long term problem and have ordered a generator at a cost of nearly three quarters of a million rand which will be up and running in approximately six weeks time. Once this generator is in place we expect to be able to offer an uninterrupted service to all our valued customers.

In the interim we will continue doing our utmost to maintain service standards. Wherever possible we have introduced flexible, extended working hours in an attempt to work around the power cuts and in so doing minimising the build up any backlogs.

Our computer room has a backup generator which keeps the main servers running allowing certain limited access to the network and internet. You will receive immediate notification when our power goes down and you will then know that we are not reading emails for the next two to three hours. For anything urgent please use the telephone - our telephone system has a adequate backup power supply and you will be able to speak to your consultant should anything urgent arise.

Please be aware that suppliers throughout the country are all experiencing the same problem and are often taking up to 72 hours to confirm bookings.

Thank you for your understanding.