Ice Cream Is Off the Menu as South African Blackouts Persist

by Christopher Spillane

Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa, gestures as he speaks during a session on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2015. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- It’s barely two hours into a baking hot Johannesburg working day and in a Haagen-Dazs store in an upmarket shopping district the ice cream is melting.
“The power went off yesterday and it’s gone off again today,” Yvonne Moyo, a shift manager at the shop, says as she searches for a schedule of South Africa’s power cuts on her phone. “The moment the power goes off, the ice cream melts. I have to get a trolley and move all the ice cream downstairs.”
Moyo’s plight is typical of the struggle facing many South Africans who have endured days of rolling blackouts this month. Some roads resemble parking lots as motorists struggle through intersections with no functioning traffic lights, while Parliament has sought assurances that the power won’t go off during President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation speech in Cape Town on Feb. 12.

Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned utility that supplies about 95 percent of South Africa’s electricity, has introduced blackouts, known locally as
load shedding, because it doesn’t have enough power to meet demand in Africa’s most-industrialized economy. The company hasn’t opened a new coal-fired plant since 2001, even as it extended supply to an extra 7 million people after the first democratic elections in 1994.
The outages, the worst since 2008, are partly due to maintenance, needed to prevent bigger blackouts in the future, and partly due to frequent breakdowns of the aging plants. There’s a 50 percent chance that the utility will implement a seventh day of electricity blackouts, Eskom said on its Twitter account on Monday.

Economy Worries

Three months of continual power cuts could shave as much as 1 percentage point off South Africa’s economic growth rate, according to Matthew Sharratt, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The government estimates the economy grew 1.4 percent last year, which would be the slowest pace since a 2009 recession. Mining companies in the country risk missing output targets because of the power-plant breakdowns, according to the biggest industry lobby group, the Chamber of Mines.
“I see a recession,” Tito Mboweni, a former South African central bank governor, said on his Twitter Inc. account last week. A “deep one,” he said.
When the electricity goes off, Moyo loads 180 liters (47 gallons) of Haagen-Dazs ice cream onto a trolley, wheels it across a road in the shopping and entertainment district of Melrose Arch and into refrigerated storage underground. If the power doesn’t come back within two hours, she’ll have to do the same again with dozens of pints of ice cream -- all in temperatures reaching as high as 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit).

‘It’s hectic’

Elsewhere in the precinct, it’s shoppers who are struggling. Tarren Miller, 32, arrives for her hair appointment to find the staff carrying salon chairs outside and seeking generator-powered electricity for hairdryers and straighteners.
“It’s hectic,” the mother of twins says while her damp hair is being combed. “My husband and I are building a house and my father-in-law brought us a generator as a present. It’s a mission with babies: heating food, their water and dealing with the heat.”
There’s a high risk of managed blackouts almost every weekday until April as the utility conducts maintenance on its power plants, Eskom said Jan. 15. The government is planning to sell state assets to help rescue the company, which is facing a 225 billion rand ($19.6 billion) funding shortfall through March 2018.
Across the precinct at a First National Bank branch, Roseline Jacobs is trying to type in the dark as she handles customer queries. Although the bank’s computers and ATMs are working, the only light entering the bank is from the entrance.
“We’ve been working in the dark since 10 a.m.,” the 32-year-old from South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province said. “It gives me a feeling of how blind people feel. We take light for granted.”