South Africa is dealing with a severe electricity problem, with power outages sometimes lasting nearly six hours each day. It also affects small business owners who are struggling to survive and are being pushed to make difficult decisions.
“We can run the store which is good, but we can’t run the whole store, and it’s affecting sales because customers tend to buy less because they are worried about their fridges at home. We deal with fresh stuff so it does not last long,” said Joe, a store owner.
The 60 million South Africans suffering from high unemployment, poverty, and growing living costs are suffering as a result of the outages that have lasted for more than 200 days since last year.
“How do I pay my workers, how do I pay my rental, how do I go forward buying stock? Very difficult. It put me through a stressful time, and I am being honest, no lies about it, very stressful where I ended up having a heart attack due to the stress,” said Abdul Ally, owner of a pizzeria.
Businesses continue to anticipate losses as the majority of perishable items are wasted. Massive losses resulted from having to discard them.
“The load shedding is affecting us too much, because our stock is going rotten, our vegetables are going rotten. We have to throw almost every day the rotten stuff,” said Honest Moyo , general worker in a vegetable store.
Just when South Africa, the continent’s largest industrialized economy, is hoping to rebound from the Covid epidemic, the crisis is halting growth.
In 2023, growth is predicted to be a paltry 0.3 percent, down from 2.5 percent in 2018.
Ref: africanews
