Eskom se Push powering on
South Africa’s beloved load-shedding notification app, Eskom se Push (ESP), has diversified its offerings while keeping its core focus the same since load-shedding was brought to a halt in March earlier this year.
Speaking to Cape Talk, ESP co-founder Dan Southwood-Wells said the app would still be available for South Africans should load-shedding return.
“First, we must compliment Eskom on a job well done. We’re really surprised that we were able to go through winter without any load-shedding,” said Southwood-Wells.
“Eskom has been quite honest that load-shedding is not gone yet, and neither are we.”
However, providing load-shedding schedules is not the app’s only function.
Southwood-Wells says that during early iterations of ESP, the developers would receive emails from users asking community-specific questions they could not answer.
To solve this, community forums were built into the app in about 2019 to allow users from the same area to engage with one another and answer questions relating to their neighbourhood.
This came to be known as ESP Chat.
“We’ve got about 300,000 users that use it on any given day and over two million over the course of a month,” Southwood-Wells said.
Southwood-Wells recently said the platform’s daily users were just over three million during peak load-shedding.
“If I look at it now, we’ve got about 5,000 conversations on any given day.”
He says these conversations are primarily about outages, with which the platform has become synonymous.
However, because of the community forums, conversations can be about water outages, people looking to buy certain items, job availability, and recommendations for places of interest.
“What we’re trying to change is to be a bit more helpful to South Africans and become more like a WhatsApp group,” Southwood-Wells added.
He says that where WhatsApp groups may be hard to find, require an invitation, and need to be linked to a phone number, ESP Chats allows users to easily find communities and join them with anonymity.
Adding a spark of humour to the darkness
Through the years, the EskomSePush team has added several helpful features, including its load-shedding timelines, calendar integration, home screen and lock screen widgets, expanded area coverage, area recommendations, and AskMyStreet.
It has also added some light-hearted features and even changed its name following a controversial exchange between Springbok hooker Bongi Mbonambi and England loose forward Tom Curry during the 2023 Rugby World Cup semi-final.
One such light-hearted feature was EskomSePush’s addition of its take on the classic mobile game Snake within its app. Users can access the game by double-tapping the EskomSePush logo.
“It’s our little way of helping you pass the time when the lights go out,” EskomSePush said.
The brief name change came following the Springbok victory over England in the 2023 Rugby World Cup semi-final and allegations of racism against Mbonambi from England’s Curry.
British media caught onto an on-field complaint by Curry that was picked up by the referee’s microphone.
“Sir! Sir! If their hooker calls me a white c***, what do I do?” Curry said.
“Nothing, please. I’ll be on it,” referee Ben O’Keeffe replied.
South Africans quickly pointed out that the swearword in question sounds precisely like the Afrikaans word for “side”, spelt “kant”.
Curry may also have heard the Afrikaans word “wyd” (wide) as “white”.
The media uproar resulted in an investigation from World Rugby, which eventually dismissed the allegations against Mbonambi.
Following Eskom’s announcement that it will keep power cuts suspended for the weekend, the app sent out a notification under the name “EskomSeKant”.
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