Doctors have complained that power has gone down in the middle of operations in hospitals, putting patients at risk. Tourists were stranded for hours when the cable car to Table Mountain was halted by a power cut.

Last Thursday was the worst day so far for the power outages, and the country’s main gold-mining companies, AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields and Harmony, as well as the platinum miners Anglo Platinum and Impala Platinum, were forced to stop production. This followed the state electricity power company, Eskom, announcing it could no longer guarantee supplies, with the risk that miners could be trapped underground. A spokesman for AngloGold said, “We are only running power for emergency supplies, such as pumping water out, and have stopped producing at all mines.”

Eskom has told its big industrial customers, mainly large-scale mines, they would have supply reduced to “survival levels” or be switched off totally for the next two to four weeks. The impact on South Africa’s economy could hardly be more serious, with 45 percent of South African Gross Domestic Production coming from mineral production.

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