President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday experienced the pain of power disruptions for the first time when the local power utility, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) disrupted his speech in the presence of international guests during the ground-breaking ceremony of the Cyber City in Mt Hampden.
Mnangagwa, who was accompanied by Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga and billionaire investor Nawab Shaji Ul Mulk, chairman of Mulk International, had to wait for three minutes as officials made frantic efforts to restore power.
When the power was restored, Mnangagwa castigated the untimely power cuts from ZESA insisting it was unprofessional for the power utility to disrupt special occasions.
“This is very humiliating. The guys at Zesa do not know the time to do their power cuts. They cannot have their load shedding when we have guests like this,” he said.
The southern African country has in the past two years expressed serious power shortages that prompted the power utility to roll out prolonged load shedding schedules.
At the height of the crisis, some parts of the country are going for 18 hours without power.
On Tuesday, Energy and Power Development minister Zhemu Soda warned that the country might endure rolling power cuts beyond August due to depressed generation capacity.
His remarks followed a notice by ZESA issued last week which warned of prolonged power outages.
Zimbabwe requires 2 000 megawatts (MW) of electricity monthly to meet power demand but has been failing to generate enough.
Imports of 500 MW from Mozambique’s Hydro Cahora Bassa and 400MW from South Africa’s ESKOM are still inadequate to close the supply gap.
Soda said the government was making frantic efforts to ease the power cuts through imports and rehabilitation of the Hwange Thermal Power Station.
