Bolt, what bolt?

This particular tale starts off with the proverbial "it was a dark and stormy night". Dark, because that's what Cape Town became for an extended period of time after SA's only nuclear power plant went through a bit of a crisis last year.

Stormy, because one erupted over the alleged cause - or not - of the power outage. The minister of public enterprises was on record - on television, radio and caught by several journalists' dictaphones - as saying a bolt did it.

Remember? Then, he was on record - ditto - as denying he had ever remotely, possibly imputed it may have been sabotage. Insiders told me otherwise at the time.

Anyway, that's ancient history and I'm sure that all the small businesses in Cape Town that lost freezers full of food and pockets full of money have forgotten and moved on with their lives.

Perhaps the Koeberg incident would have faded from our collective memories if another similar incident had not happened last week. This time it was a turbine, excess demand, and units down at five other stations.

Call me a pessimist if you will, but that just smacks of bad planning - 4 600MW down at the same time? Really?

Even Eskom's head honcho Thulani Gcabashe has previously said SA's economic growth took the parastatal by surprise. Until recently, the company's forward planning was totally out of kilter with government's own aggressive growth plan.

You see, when Eskom did finally wake up and realise you can run out of electricity, the country was already steaming ahead. We had red carpets laid down left, right and centre begging large companies like Alcan to build a smelter here, overseas banking giants to build call centres here, and were promising to do away with all that ails developing countries - like constant power interruptions.

Call me a pessimist if you will, but that just smacks of bad planning - 4 600MW down at the same time? Really?

Nicola Mawson, senior journalist, ITWeb

And constant they have been. It's not just the load shedding, or last year's jokes around Cape Town being in the dark. It's also the power failures that plague Gauteng's West Rand every time it rains, or gets a little cold.

Big business is realising this. FNB ran out and bought generators and UPS systems. (Now would be a great time to sell generators and UPS systems - even at a ridiculous mark-up.) The SA Chamber of Business warned about the economic impact this could have, as did economists and analysts.

The problem is, as those in the retail industry will confirm, even if the electric automatic doors are wedged open, the computerised cash register will not work, and you cannot use plastic to pay for anything. No one carries cash any more.

Mines - until recently the centre of our economy - closed down for the day, at massive cost.

It's not only the inconvenience of a kettle that will not boil, or a petrol station that cannot make that little empty light go away. It's the shutting down of Africa's powerhouse.

Which is why I'm a bit confused by finance minister Trevor Manuel's recent comments: "The responses tend to be overcooked. The numbers that they generate are complete and utter garbage... It will not affect growth," Reuters reported the man in charge of SA's purse strings as saying.