Life has been extremely tough for businesses in Emfuleni, with an unpredictable electricity supply hampering production.
Among these businesses is Immanuel Meat Market, an old butchery in Vanderbijlpark. The butchery is positioned right across one of Emfuleni’s substations.
Its owner, Harm Muller, said power outages had hit his business hard. In the past two weeks, the butchery experienced two outages. One was from 8pm until 2pm the following day. The following week, there was load-shedding that was supposed to be from 8am to midday but the power only came back the next morning at 11.
“In the last outages, which are not related to load-shedding, I witnessed two explosions at the substation. We then lose power for the whole day or about eight hours a day…It is totally unacceptable,” Harm said.
He uses a 150 kilowatt generator which runs on diesel. He has large freezers, compressors and machines that are used to store and produce meat.
Muller said over the past three years, he had witnessed five to six explosions at the substation. “In one of the explosions, we were without power for about a week-and-a-half. We spent over R50,000 on diesel,” he said.
Covid-19 has made things even worse for Harm and his workers. His profits plummeted 40% month-to-month, forcing him to reduce the number of working staff at any given point. A total of 30 people work at the butchery.
“We’ve got two teams, one working in one week, the other off. In such an environment, our business cannot handle things like power outages because they deplete our margin. It is totally unacceptable but we are soldering on.
“Money is low at the moment, especially in this industrial area. I think about 40% of businesses have closed down. Along our street, four businesses have closed down. That is retail money that is gone. It is people who come buy here during the day but now they are gone,” Harm said.
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