HARARE - Budget speeches are usually remembered for their numbers. Mthuli Ncube’s 2025 budget will be remembered for the moment the numbers could no longer be read.
As the Finance Minister was concluding his speech in the New Parliament Building at Mount Hampden on Thursday, the lights flickered and died. The BBC reported that President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga and members of parliament were left sitting in the dark. According to The Zimbabwean, the President was escorted out of the building in darkness, as Parliament’s generators took moments to come to life.
Opposition MPs did not miss the moment. As the lights went out, the BBC reported, they shouted that the outage was an apt metaphor for the country’s state of affairs.
Act of nature, says ZESA
The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority moved quickly to deny that the President had been load-shed. Its spokesperson, George Manyaya, said the blackout had not been planned and that Parliament had its own dedicated supply, exempt from power cuts. “It’s an act of nature and definitely not load shedding as is being suggested on social media,” he said, as quoted by The Zimbabwean. He blamed lightning.
Parliament later apologised to Mnangagwa and the nation. In a statement reported by The Zimbabwean, it said thunderstorms and high winds had affected overhead lines, tripping a 132kV feeder that supplies the substation serving Mount Hampden at about 3.25pm. The building’s standby generator had been hit by the same surge, it said, and lost its memory settings.
Not every outlet accepted the explanation. ZimEye reported that the outage was caused by ZESA’s ongoing load shedding, while also carrying Manyaya’s denial.
The country’s daily darkness
Whatever struck Mount Hampden, the rest of the country did not need a storm to lose power. The BBC reported that Zimbabwe has faced daily 12-hour blackouts, driven by a prolonged drought that has crippled generation at Kariba Dam, the country’s main power source.
That context was in the speech itself. Before the lights went out, Ncube told Parliament that agriculture would contract by 15 percent this year because of the drought. He projected 6 percent growth next year, on the strength of a forecast of above-average rains, which, the BBC noted, would also help the electricity supply.
In other words, the budget’s recovery plan depends in part on the weather. On Thursday, the weather had the last word.
The cartoons’ verdict
The cartoon published the same day needs only a line: “ZESA closes the budget presentation with a bold statement.” The rest of the frame is black, broken only by rows of startled eyes. It is the most accurate picture of the chamber anyone produced that day, because nobody could see anything else.
A later cartoon offers a sourer view of how power cuts are shared. A chef in a ZETDC apron serves a thin citizen and a well-fed official at the same candlelit table, under a mission statement promising that the utility serves everyone equally. It is satire, and the official’s plate is the cartoonist’s opinion. But Parliament, by ZESA’s own account, does have a dedicated supply that households do not.
What comes next
The Zimbabwean noted that the incident could not have come at a worse time, with national and international attention focused on how the government planned to tackle the country’s economic challenges.
The 2025 budget has now been delivered, in full, if not entirely in the light. Its success will depend on growth, on rain, and on the turbines at Kariba. For many households waiting out a 12-hour blackout, Thursday’s outage in Parliament was simply a short taste of an ordinary day.
