Still going on. We were without power from 12h00 to 14h00 this afternoon and will be again from 20h00 to 22h00 tonight, and that pattern will persist for at least the next few days (along with another outage in the wee hours so most of us don't care much.)

I have a solar contractor coming tomorrow to do the planning for an off-grid installation...

yeah, we/they do (I'm South African but don't live there). There is a famous app is RSA, called EskomSePush (https://sepush.co.za/), that sends users push notifications on when there will be blackouts.

Eskom is the Energy supplier in RSA, and "se Push" is a word play on Push notifications and Afrikaans slang for vagina (poes)

It's been going on for nearly 15 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis) - although to varying degrees over that time.