gates and streets pitch black at night, criminals have new opportunities in a nation with 25 percent unemployment and massive inequality.
Such effects can be devastating - but they still pale in comparison with the consequences of a grid collapse.
The chaos would not be short-lived. Eskom, which stresses that a complete shutdown is extremely unlikely, nonetheless has emergency plans in place to resume power delivery – known as a “black start” - but warns it would take weeks.
“In our projections, it is roughly a two-to-four week period to restart the whole country,” Al´Louise van Deventer, Eskom´s national control manager, told Reuters at the utility´s nerve centre near Johannesburg.
Behind her in the bowels of the ultra-secure building stand banks of screens and computer terminals, staffed round-the-clock in an operation similar to NASA´s mission control.
In such an emergency scenario, Zuma and his cabinet would be taken to a secret location and soldiers would be deployed at key sites such as the central bank and South African Broadcasting Corporation HQ, a government source said.
“The government has command centres that will be activated to make sure we can maintain law and order,” said another government source. “The military will be deployed so broadcast and communication is secure.” Zuma´s office declined to comment.
After a power supply crunch and spate of blackouts in 2008, many South African businesses and a few homes have back-up generators, but over time they will run out of fuel - as will the generators at fuel stations, bringing transport to a halt.
“Those who have diesel generators will only be able to run them for as long as fuel reserves last, as petrol and diesel pumps work off electricity. Then, people will be in trouble,” van Deventer said.
Eskom, which supplies almost all the country´s electricity, has not put a figure on how much investment it would need to upgrade infrastructure to the level needed to avoid blackouts.
Zuma´s government in October said it would inject 20 billion rand ($1.7 billion) to boost its coffers and convert its existing 60 billion rand subordinated loan to state-owned equity.
At their worst, rolling blackouts or “load-shedding” have never taken out more than 3,000 MW of demand, roughly 10 percent of consumption.
However, many big companies are not taking their chances. Gold and platinum mining companies say they have emergency power units to get men above ground, but are unable to generate the vast amounts of electricity needed to operate what are some of the deepest mines in the world, at up 4 km (2.5 miles). MTN, Africa´s biggest mobile phone firm, has a private 2 MW power plant at its Johannesburg headquarters with 1.5 million litres of diesel reserves - enough, it says, to keep its core operations going for a month.
“If you don´t have diesel reserves then you are in big trouble,” said Willem Webber, MTN´s “core implementation manager” who is working on plans to generate up to 24 MW for the firm´s own needs and possible feeding back into the grid. “Imagine a company like MTN down for a month.”