As a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph, I have lived before in countries with occasionally patchy electricity supplies, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, but nowhere nearly as bad as South Africa is at present.

The blackouts are not restricted to Cape Town and the situation is if anything worse in the rest of South Africa. 

An escalating energy crisis has left Africa’s most industrialised nation unable to keep the lights on and having to impose daily rationing of electricity to stop the national grid collapsing.

Rolling power outages which were at first supposed to be an emergency measure are now routine and loom over both the country’s economic landscape and residents’ daily schedules.

‘Exceptionally difficult winter’

Starved of investment for decades and looted by corruption, the country’s fleet of coal power stations providing four-fifths of the country’s power have been run into the ground and are breaking down.

Power cuts, known as load-shedding, have slowly been escalating since they began 15 years ago, but have gotten sharply worse in the past nine months. There are now concerns the coming southern hemisphere winter, when temperatures drop and demand for electricity rises, will usher in a new highpoint for outages.

“I’ll be brutally honest. It’s going to be an exceptionally difficult winter,” the newly appointed electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, warned last week.

Eskom, the state-run power generator, can guarantee supplies of 27,000 megawatts, Mr Ramokgopa has said. But summer demand peaked at 32,000 MW, and in winter it can soar to 37,000 MW.