Blitz Bureau
LUSAKA: Despite having the mighty Zambezi River and the massive hydro-powered Kariba Dam, Zambia is currently grappling with the worst electricity blackouts in living memory.
The crisis is so severe that cities and towns across the country are sometimes without electricity for three consecutive days, with people counting themselves lucky if the lights come on for an hour or two.
The power cuts have come as a shock to the 43 per cent of Zambians who are connected to the grid and have taken electricity for granted all their lives. But one of the severest droughts in decades – caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon – has decimated Zambia’s power-generation capacity.
Zambia sources up to 84 per cent of its electricity from water reservoirs such as lakes and rivers, while only 13 pc comes from coal.Contributions from solar, diesel and heavy fuel oil are even lower, accounting for 3 per cent.
For several weeks, the crisis was compounded while the country’s only coal-fired power plant, Maamba Energy, was not operating at maximum capacity as it underwent routine maintenance work.
On October 10, there was finally some good news when Minister of Energy MakozoChikote said the plant was now fully operational, and Zambians would have at least three hours of electricity a day.
President HakaindeHichilema declared the drought a national disaster in February but the Government has been unable to solve the energy crisis because Zambia is heavily reliant on the Kariba Dam for its electricity.
A financial crunch also severely restricted the Government’s ability to import power as suppliers wanted payment upfront, though a spokesman for state-owned power utility Zesco, MatongoMaumbi, told BBC’s Focus on Africa podcast that electricity was being imported from Mozambique and South Africa to ease the crisis.
Located on the Zambezi, the fourthlongest river in Africa, Kariba was built in the 1950s and is the reservoir for the country’s largest underground power station, Kariba North Bank Power Station. A power station on the other bank serves Zimbabwe.
