Nepal calls it load shedding too. In practice it's fairly counterproductive there. People buy banks of car batteries and inverters to store power when it's available and use it later. So they use as much power as before, with the added benefit of tons of hazardous waste from all the equipment at each building. Which of course they just throw into piles of broken stuff.

Does the same happen in South Africa?

Its very typical and not just for power. It happens with water as well.

The pattern is simular, unstable supply leads to private infrastructure. Demand increases when supply is available, leading to more instablilty. Quality goes down because private infrastructure is usually second rate.

In egypt water quality is way down because of private storage in water tanks.

When load-shedding "Season" happens, which we had recently, yes. Everyone wants to protect themselves, so a lot of people buy inverters + battery packs, or diesel/petrol generators.

Most proactive electric grids have load shedding plans. The question is how often do they need to put them in action.

Not entirely the same thing. 'Load shedding' in South Africa has effectively been scheduled blackouts of entire metropolitan areas, including the major cities, to avoid a grid meltdown and to allow for plant repairs.

It's caused by too many plants being poorly-maintained and breaking down and insufficient investment in new power plants caused by corruption and incompetence. In other words, not regular localised reductions or transfers of load, but the same wide scale forced blackouts as being discussed elsewhere in this thread.

There has, thankfully, been no load shedding over the past few months, but only because the economy has slowed down sufficiently that the country's electricity demand has dropped below its regular levels.