By Kingsley Jassi:

The power industry may have increased elec­tri­city access from 11 per­cent to 25.9 per­cent but user exper­i­ence appears to have been left behind fol­low­ing incess­ant black­outs.

The sec­tor has mixed trends: on one side the World Bank is cel­eb­rat­ing gains in elec­tri­city access expan­sion, on the other side SMEs and the gen­eral pub­lic are com­plain­ing about power inter­rup­tions.

The World Bank has just repor­ted about Malawi Elec­tri­city Access Project (Meap) mile­stones with two mil­lion people to have bene­fit­ted from new con­nec­tions, with 160 000 new grid con­nec­tions that have seen new busi­nesses mush­room­ing.

“Elec­tri­city access has enabled small-scale eco­nomic activ­ity— includ­ing retail shops, phonechar­ging busi­nesses and food pro­cessing—cre­at­ing new job oppor­tun­it­ies, par­tic­u­larly for women in newly con­nec­ted com­munit­ies,” reads a World Bank update on the project.

Appar­ently, the efforts on the new con­nec­tions have not been matched with power gen­er­a­tion as Escom con­tin­ues to struggle with adequate sup­ply.

On Fri­day, Elec­tri­city Gen­er­a­tion Com­pany (Egenco) offi­cials told Par­lia­ment­ary Com­mit­tee on Gov­ern­ment Assur­ance and Pub­lic Sec­tor Reforms mem­bers that the power sys­tem had massive break­downs and standby gen­er­at­ors could not be sup­plied with enough diesel due to sup­ply issues.

The com­pany’s dir­ector of plan­ning, Jed­die Luka, said, in total, the sys­tem has lost 100 mega­watts, lead­ing to sub­stan­tially low power sup­ply to Escom.

This has a toll on busi­ness oper­a­tions and Malawi Union of SMEs Pres­id­ent James Chi­utsi said its mem­bers exper­i­ence rising cost of energy in busi­nesses.

“A rapid sur­vey of 30 SMEs in Lilongwe, Blantyre, and Mzuzu shows that 27 busi­nesses now spend over 30 per­cent of their monthly oper­at­ing costs on diesel and pet­rol for gen­er­at­ors. Many report spend­ing between K200,000 and K450,000 per month on fuel alone,” Chi­utsi said.

Eco­nom ics Asso­ci­ation of Malawi Pres­id­ent Ber­tha Chi­kadza said author­it­ies should pri­or­it­ise stra­tegic inter­ven­tions that move bey­ond short-term fixes, cit­ing the Malawi-Mozam­bi­que power inter­con­nec­tion project as crit­ical.