Business owners in the Nelson Mandela Bay area in the Eastern Cape say are concerned about the latest round of stage six rolling blackouts.
Eskom on Wednesday introduced stage six which is expected to last until 5am tomorrow morning. Stage five will then take effect until Saturday morning.
Business owners in the city say they are worried about increased losses due to extended downtime.
They say the increase in operational expenses by running generators also hits their bottom lines.
“Regardless of what stage we are on it has always been an issue. Most of these restaurants run big heavy equipment. With the generators it costs [a lot] to maintain those throughout the day. It just causes so much more stress on the business owners back-to-back because of load shedding, some of the food items we had went to waste, and the circuit board, even now we are closed we don’t have electricity,” says one of the business owners.
Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism chairperson, Andrew Stuart, is confident of a successful holiday season, despite the rolling blackouts.
“With load shedding as it is quite high everyone coming from a local destination would understand it. Our international guests might find it a bit challenging however because we have been under load shedding for so long most of our tourism operators have made back up plans so I don’t think load shedding is going to have any real effect on the visitor.”
A pinch for small businesses as Eskom power cuts remain:
