Zimbabwe’s parliament was plunged into darkness as Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube was delivering the concluding remarks of his budget speech.
The sudden power outage left top government officials, including President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga, sitting in the dark alongside members of parliament.
The blackout is emblematic of Zimbabwe’s energy crisis, marked by daily 12-hour power cuts. These blackouts stem from a prolonged drought severely impacting energy generation at the Kariba Dam, the country’s primary power source.
As the chamber went dark, opposition MPs seized the moment, shouting that the power failure symbolized the nation’s dire state. George Manyaya, spokesperson for the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA), told ZimLive that the incident was unplanned. He explained that parliament operates on a dedicated electricity line exempt from load-shedding but attributed the outage to a lightning strike.
Before the disruption, Ncube painted a mixed picture of Zimbabwe’s economic future. He noted that the agricultural sector is expected to shrink by 15% this year due to the drought but forecasted a 6% economic growth next year, driven by predictions of above-average rainfall, which could also alleviate the energy shortages.
