Load Shedding

Load shedding is the lovely phrase that means "We are going to discontinue your power source with no warning".
Currently we are having daily electricity and gas outages. Electricity has been going off daily at 7am for about an hour and then off again about 12pm for another hour or two, and sometimes it goes off again around dinner time. Gas (which most houses use for hot water and cooking) is a lot more erratic and goes off at irregular but frequent times.
This all makes showering, hair drying, cooking, etc a little awkward. I have learnt to keep a torch handy.
There are literally hundereds of houses being built around where I live. I was told last week that an indefinite moratorium has been placed on hooking new houses up to the gas supply. So hundereds of houses may be completed with no proper heating for water or cooking. They can use gas bottles but these are extremely expensive and notoriously unsafe.
Of course if you grease the right palms with enough money you can probably manage to find a way around this moratorium.