January 23, 2008	Wednesday	Muharram 13, 1429

CAPE TOWN: Southern Africa’s electricity crisis intensified on Tuesday with Zimbabwe and Zambia hit by massive new blackouts while hundreds of tourists were stranded on Cape Town’s famed Table Mountain.

As regional powerhouse South Africa warned it may have to freeze supplies to its neighbours in order to deal with its own shortages, other countries were left scrambling for alternative sources of energy.

In Zimbabwe, whose cash-strapped government is severely in arrears to South Africa’s power utility Eskom, commercial production ground to a halt after the second nationwide outage in four days.

The phone network, traffic lights and commuter trains were put out of action by the blackout, which began on Monday night and was rectified in the afternoon.

Ben Rafemoyo, chief executive of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa), said it was too early to determine the cause of the problem, which also appeared to be behind blackouts in its northern neighbour Zambia.

“We are still trying to establish the cause of the blackout. We cannot state the cause at the moment without carrying out investigations,” said Rhodnie Sisala, managing director of the state-run Zambia Electricity Supply Company (Zesco).

South Africans have been left fuming over the past fortnight by the rolling power cuts that affect households and businesses for several hours each day.

The nature of the problem was underlined by a hugely embarrassing incident on Monday night when nearly 900 local and foreign tourists were stranded on the Table Mountain for more than five hours, with nearly 100 having to be freed from two cable cars frozen in mid-air.

Some estimates have put the overall cost to business in South Africa at more than two billion rand ($280 million), as the country’s economic growth surprised and outstripped power generation capacity.

The country’s Milk Producers’ Organisation said Tuesday the industry was losing about 100 million rand a month, excluding losses incurred as a result of refrigeration lapses.

The South African cabinet put the issue at the top of its agenda for a three-day meeting this week that kicked off on Tuesday with a request by Eskom for more money for infrastructure.

Government spokesman Themba Maseko said a strategy would be thrashed out over the next few days, which may include savings incentives and a cessation of supply to neighbouring countries.

“The impact of load-shedding on the economy, citizens and the country’s image is regretted,” said Maseko.

“Government gives the assurance that everything is being done at the highest level ... to find an inclusive solution to the energy problem in the short, medium and long term.” Eskom said over the weekend it was cutting supplies to the country’s neighbours, prompting the tiny kingdom of Swaziland, which gets about 80 per cent of its power from South Africa, to look elsewhere.

“We will be engaging Mozambique so that we may buy electricity from them,” Swaziland Electricity Board general manager Sikhumbuzo Tsabedze told Radio Swaziland on Tuesday.

Botswana, too, turned to Mozambique after shortages and outages caused by Eskom reducing its supply from 410MW last year to 350MW this year.

But the Botswana Power Corporation said in a statement on Tuesday that it was also experiencing problems, saying that supplies from Mozambique had been delayed by a problem with an electricity tower in Zimbabwe which was acting as a conduit.

—AFP