When the power started going out daily in South Africa, the lights also went out on Lungie Klaas’s coffee shop. He and his wife had poured in £14,700 of savings to get their business off the ground, and their hard work had been rewarded with a decent trade among the morning commuters in their Cape Town suburb.
That was until relentless rolling blackouts started hitting each day at their busiest time. At a stroke, coffee machines could not work during their peak business hours and they lost three-fifths of their custom. Running a generator was too expensive, so they had to close. “That put four guys out of a job,” he recalls.
