Blackouts are becoming longer and more frequent in Egypt, as a growing energy and economic crisis pushes the Egyptian government to intensify “load shedding.”

At least once a day, the hum of every fan, air conditioner and fridge across Egypt goes quiet. The lights go out and an expletive is muttered or hurled into the quickly-heating air.

Lifts stop, errands are cancelled and meetings delayed for as long as the power stays out — hopefully an hour or two, but recently even longer.

It is now a year since energy and foreign currency crises led Egypt’s government to institute planned blackouts known as “load shedding”.

High tempers and temperatures

Amid three heatwaves in June, the blackouts grew longer and more frequent — and with them nationwide frustration, including from talk show hosts who have been fervent supporters of the government.

“Electricity is not a luxury, this is the most basic right,” prominent journalist Lamis al-Hadidy wrote on Monday on social media site X.

The blackouts come as Egyptians face the worst economic crisis of their lives, with inflation and currency devaluations shredding savings and leaving families struggling to make ends meet.

Since 2022, the Egyptian pound has lost two-thirds of its value, and last year inflation reached a record 40 percent.

Electricity prices last rose in January, and the government has signaled it is looking to raise them again this year.

This week, as temperatures in Cairo hovered around 40C, swathes of the capital have experienced additional midnight blackouts for up to two hours — in addition to the existing midday outages.

On Tuesday, as public ire peaked, Egypt’s prime minister Mostafa Madbouly held a press conference in which he said Egyptians should expect three-hour outages to continue this week.

The premier also said Egypt would spend $1.2 billion in July, 2.6 percent of the crisis-hit country’s precious foreign currency reserves, to shore up its fuel supply.

Death toll

The outages have already claimed lives across the country.

Aswan parliamentarian Riham Abdelnaby told local media there were “around 40 heat-related deaths” within four days in June.

In the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, a musician named Mohammed Ali Nasr died earlier in June after falling down the shaft of a lift during an outage, his brother told Al-Nahar.

Across Egypt, people have taken to planning their lives around the official schedules to avoid getting stuck in lifts. But similar deaths have claimed at least four lives, according to a tally of local media reports.

Bahira Amin, with AFP