Overview
- A sudden outage interrupted President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s State of the Nation Address, and he completed closing lines by torchlight before power returned after roughly ten minutes.
- Officials say the building was running on a generator as the main supply with ZESA on standby when a circuit breaker tripped and the generator kept running without delivering load.
- Parliament issued a formal apology to the president and the nation and said joint inquiries with the Local Government Ministry, ZESA and other agencies will publish findings and prevention measures.
- Speaker Jacob Mudenda suggested possible sabotage and vowed accountability, while ruling party supporters on social media also labeled the blackout as deliberate.
- The Zimbabwe Electricity and Distribution Company placed managing director Abel Gurupira on forced leave pending the probe, and the venue previously suffered a November 2024 outage that ZESA attributed to natural causes.