By Ray Ndlovu
BULAWAYO – It is 05:00 hours in the morning and daybreaks are supposed to be peaceful in Kumalo, an affluent suburb in Bulawayo. But the noise of humming petrol and diesel generators overwhelms the neighbourhood.
Generators should normally be a stop-gap measure to light up households when there is an electrical fault or blackout, but residents in this suburb are now accustomed to their daily drone because of the 20-hour daily load shedding introduced by the country’s power utility, ZESA Holdings, to deal with an electricity supply crisis.
Kumalo is home to the Jewish community and some of the wealthiest and well-known businesspersons in Bulawayo. Political figures such as Jacob Mudenda, the Speaker of Parliament, are also residents of the suburb. This means even the political elite have not been spared from the prevailing power crisis.
With the crippling power crunch, it has ceased being business as usual in the suburb.
Gardeners say their normal working routines have also been affected as a result of the never ending power outages and they have been forced to adapt.
Generators, however, can only do so much.
“I have to wake up around 3am to iron the laundry, which I would have done the day before. Because it is now summer and much hotter, the swimming pool needs more attention and I have to run the pool pump at night when we have electricity,” said Fidelis Khuphe, a gardener in the area.
Sprinklers that usually run during the daytime, especially at homes with borehole water for gardening, have disappeared. Boreholes rely on electricity to pump water, but with power supplies now erratic, gardening is fast becoming a luxury.
Those still able to water their gardens and lawns do so during the night. At the nearby Parklands shopping centre, the impact that the power cuts have had on business is quite visible.
Bon Marche, a supermarket chain that is part of the country’s largest retailer OK Zimbabwe, has been forced to close a section of its refrigeration, as the unsustainably long periods of power cuts have resulted in meat and fresh food supplies going bad.
A visit by the Financial Gazette to the retail outlet this week showed that two large fridges, used for fresh fruit and meat, had been switched off. The supermarket is facing the power cuts head-on with an industrial size generator.
But this is proving to be a costly affair for the supermarket, leaving employees wondering how long they would be able to keep up with the associated costs of running on generator. An employee who is not authorised to speak to the press told this publication that drums of fuel were being bought to keep the lights on at the supermarket.
“What we spend on fuel is sometimes much more than we make as profits. We use drums of fuel to keep running, but I fear that if this (power cuts) continues it will be unsustainable for us in the long run,” said the employee.
To go around the challenge, Bon Marche, like many other retailers across the country, has cut down on orders for fresh food and fresh produce.
“We now prefer to receive daily deliveries, which we know we would be able to sell in a day. We no longer take large orders, such as those that need to be placed in the cold room, as this would mean the products will go bad,” the employee added.
While some try to adapt and tackle the power outages in the suburb in their stride, others refuse to take the explanations given by ZESA for the blackouts without pointing an accusing finger at the powers that be. The frustration and anger is recognisable and is slowly building up.
“What use is power to anyone between 10pm and 4am? The problem of course is the low levels of water in Lake Kariba, which, by the way, had less water during the 1992 drought, although we never experienced this kind of load shedding,” said Mark Peters, a Kumalo resident.
“We now have lost over 90 percent of industry and, if you consider that industry consumed about 90 percent of power and now 90 percent of it is gone and we have no power, it just boggles the mind,” said Peters. Financial Gazette
