Posted By Own Staff  Thursday, 11 March 2010 18:33

IMBIBERS of the traditional Calabash will have to go without the conventional liquid for a while as its producer, Ingwebu Breweries has stopped the manufacture of all its products following a power outage since last week.

The plant will only resume production after power supplies are restored. The company issued a statement in the press to alert its customers.

“Ingwebu breweries will not be able to manufacture your favourite products because of a power outage that began on Wednesday 3 March at 1900hours. Products shall not be available until ZESA restores power supplies,” read the statement.

In an interview on Monday the Marketing and Corporate Affairs Manager, Nkosana Ndlovu said the power outage had cost the company a lot of business.

“Since Wednesday the 3rd of March to date, we have not had electricity as there is a fault in the area. This has greatly cost us a lot of business and our customers have been greatly short-changed,” he said.

Ndlovu said the company was at a standstill due to the electricity problem.

“We are not manufacturing anything at all. The machinery used to produce our products is extremely heavy and as such there cannot be any other alternatives, not even a generator can solve the problem,” he said.

Ndlovu said they had contacted the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) who promised to look into the issue.

“We contacted ZESA and they said they are trying their best to rectify the problem. However, we feel they are not taking it as an urgent issue, because we have already lost a lot of business and we do not want this situation to continue until the end of this week,” said Ndlovu.

The country is  undergoing load shedding that lasts between eight and 10 hours, as several units at the Hwange Power station are down.
The excessive load shedding has mostly affected businesses.