Aside from being a massive annoyance, rolling blackouts having a crippling effect on investment and economic growth. The SA Reserve Bank (Sarb), in its Monetary Policy Review (MPR), has just given a new estimate on this front, and it probably won’t be the last.

“The SARB estimates that load shedding will shave about 1.0 percentage points from growth in 2022, which is an additional 0.4 percentage points compared to the previous MPR,” the central bank said.

Six months ago, the Sarb saw rolling blackouts hacking a little over half a percent off growth in gross domestic product. It has now almost doubled that impact, which is a reflection of the surge in power cuts this year. Cumulative rolling blackouts in 2022 to date already surpasses any previous year by a long shot.

And one percentage point off growth is a big deal unless you applied it to China, until recently, or India.

The Sarb’s forecast for 2022 South African growth as it stands is only 1.9%. In other words, without rolling blackouts, it would have been 2.9%. Put another way, rolling blackouts are predicted to slash growth by a third this year, and the situation only seems to be getting worse.

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Presumably, the only people who would be “shocked” by this turn of events are members of South Africa’s mostly dysfunctional Cabinet, who live in the splendid isolation of electricity which never gets turned off and blue-light brigades whisking them through failing robots and snarled traffic.

Almost no business can function in the 21st century without a reliable supply of power. Those who can afford it buy solar panels or generators and fuel to run them, but such items come with costs and represent capital that would have been deployed in other ways. Smaller businesses that cannot afford such routes may simply go under — and many have.

And, of course, efforts to attract foreign direct investment are now a joke. You just can’t get meaningful investment flows if you can’t keep the lights on — it’s that simple. DM/BM