Why Maridadi wanted an inquiry into the power sector in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is currently facing acute power shortages because the government has not invested in any power generation projects since independence, Mabvuku-Tafara Member of Parliament James Maridadi said.

Maridadi introduced a motion calling for an inquiry in the present power shortages in parliament on 17 October. He said the situation was so bad that manufacturing was only operating at 35 percent of capacity because of the power shortages.

The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority had lost so many engineers because of government interference and poor remuneration that it was now the training ground for engineers for the Southern African Development Community countries.

“Some competent engineers have been dismissed as scapegoats for government bungling. Between 2004 and 2011, ZESA lost several highly qualified engineers and technicians but I will confine myself to the 25 Chartered Electrical Engineers that I know personally because I worked with them as a General Manager of one of the departments at ZESA,” he said.

“Of the 25, 12 are holders of Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering, in addition to the BSc obtained at the University of Zimbabwe. Sixteen are holders of either MBA or MBL in addition to the MSc or BSc in Engineering.”

The Ministry of Energy itself was the most volatile government ministry and had seen no less than 18 different ministers in the past 33 years.

“In all, the ministry has engaged and disengaged not less than 18 ministers. Only a handful was good. The rest were quite unhelpful.”

Below is his full contribution:

MR. MARIDADI: I move the motion standing in my name that this House:
ALARMED by the intermittent power cuts to both domestic and commercial consumers as a result of load-shedding and faults;

• CONCERNED by the lack of capacity by ZESA to attend timeously to faults;
• DEEPLY WORRIED by the ever increasing gap between demand and supply;
• ALSO DEEPLY ALARMED by the lack of investment into the power sector by the shareholder;
• FURTHER CONCERNED by the flight of qualified and experienced personnel, which has adverse effects on the electricity supply industry;
• NOW THEREFORE: resolves that the Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy conducts an inquiry into the power sector in Zimbabwe.

MR. CHIMANIKIRE: I second.

MR. MARIDADI: Mr. Speaker Sir, allow me to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank the people of Mabvuku and Tafara for exercising their vote wisely and allowing me to minister to the nation through the august House, as said in the Bible in Matthew Chapter 5 verses 13 to14, that “you are the salt and the light of the earth”, and that is what I intend to do.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to contextualize my presentation by giving a historical perspective of the Electricity Supply Authority Industry and walk through the various stages of growth or lack thereof, leading to the obtaining situation in the sector.

I stand here to give a true reflection of the gap that exists between demand and supply of electricity and to give recommendation on how the gap can be narrowed progressively leading to its total closure, hopefully during our lifetime.

The growth of an economy is dependent on the availability of electricity, just as much as the growth of a child is dependent on the mother’s milk, whether it is humans or animals. That is how it works.

Just as much as the development of a people is judged by the number per capita with access to clean drinking water, development is also judged by the number of households per capita with access to electricity. The fact that electricity is an economic enabler cannot be denied.

The beauty with this subject before us, Mr. Speaker, is that it is colour blind and it transcends political barriers without respect. When there is no electricity in Mabvuku and Tafara, where I come from, everyone in the constituency is in darkness regardless of their colour, religious persuasion or political affiliation.

Officially commissioning a 330Kv substation at Dema in 1988, President Mugabe, in the company of his Mozambican counterpart Joachim Chissano and the then Minister of Energy, Enos Chikowore, said “let there be power, let there be light and let there be civilization”.

Where there is no light, people will grapple in darkness. The pun is intended and I use it with relish abundance. My first day in this august House was blighted by four power cuts, which nearly derailed the smooth running of the business of the day. Everyone present on that day, including the Presiding Officers and you Mr. Speaker, were affected and irritated the same way.

The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) was formed in 1986, through the Electricity Act of 1985 by amalgamation of the former Electricity Supply Commission (ESC), Central African Power Corporation (CAPCO) and Electricity Departments of the municipalities of Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru and Mutare. The current structure of the ZESA Group of Companies culminated from the electricity sector reforms that saw the enactment of the Electricity Act, Chapter 13:19, in 2002 and its subsequent amendments. As such, ZESA Holdings is the anchor of the electricity supply industry in Zimbabwe.

ZESA has five electricity generating plants with a total installed capacity of 1 950 MW. Kariba, the country’s only hydro power plant outside of IPPs, which are Independent Power Producers, located on Lake Kariba South Bank, was commissioned in 1961 with a capacity of 750MW. Hwange, the biggest of the four thermal power stations, with a capacity of 950MW, was conceived and commissioned in the 1970s to augment the existing three smaller thermal power stations located at Harare, Bulawayo and Munyati in Kwekwe. The three smaller thermal stations were commissioned back in the 1940s with a combined installed capacity of about 375MW. The three are inoperable due to obsolete equipment which renders them uneconomic to run.

Harare Power Station which has an original installed capacity of 120 MW and for reasons given above, struggles to dispatch 25 MW and still these 25 MW are only dispatched three days a week at the very most. Bulawayo Power Station has been shut down completely due to perennial water shortages in the region. The Matabeleland-Zambezi Water Project, the only hope for guaranteed water supplies to the Southern Region of the country remains a talk show on Government schedule since time immemorial when the cost of the project was pegged at only US$100 million.

The foregoing Mr. Speaker Sir, essentially means that the last green project undertaken by Government in this sector was well before 1980. From 1980 to date, Government has displayed a total lack of vision and forward planning. Zimbabwe therefore relies on Kariba Power Station which was built by England and Hwange built during the UDI days when Rhodesia was under UN sanctions. Hwange is currently dispatching half its capacity due to aged equipment. Kariba, the more reliable of the two is currently sitting at 500 MW out of a possible 750 due to statutory maintenance work currently underway.

Mr. Speaker, Zimbabwe needs about 2200 MW suppressed demand during the winter peak and this could easily go up to 3000MW if supplies were readily available. Currently, ZESA is producing a paltry 1000 MW a day. The difference is imported from the region and mostly from Hydro Cabora Bassa (HCB) in Mozambique at an average cost of US$6.5 million a month. I should hasten to add that, only 50 MW are confirmed each day and the remainder of up to 350MW is sold subject to availability at HBC.

The above unfortunate scenario means Zimbabwe is a net electricity importer and one of the biggest such per capita power importers on the continent. Our country’s manufacturing sector is operating at about 35% capacity and fast declining and yet we do not have adequate power for such small demand. One can only imagine how the economic boom in the next five years threatened the ZANU PF manifesto for the recently held harmonised plebiscite will be realised without a miracle first happening in the Electricity Supply Industry.

ZESA ‘will simply take us closer to the trees.’ Mr. Speaker, I use this saying courtesy of our induction a few weeks ago and I do so cautiously and I apply it metaphorically. Whilst the much talked about extension at Kariba will add another 50% capacity, there are a few challenges which I wish to draw the attention of this august House to. If work and that project were to start today, we would need another five years before the project is commissioned. As it stands, no work has commenced.

Interestingly, Zambia is undertaking a similar extension project on their side of the lake and theirs is nearing completion. Extensions of 300 MW on either side of the lake as anticipated by the two countries; Zimbabwe and Zambia Mr. Speaker Sir, will put pressure on the available water. In any case, the power that will be produced as a result of the extension on Kariba South will not be for base load but will be for picking up load because the original design of Kariba Power Station is for six generators only.

Interestingly and quite suspiciously so Mr. Speaker Sir, the same contractor working on the Zambian project has won a tender to undertake the Zimbabwean project on the South bank. I do not know how this is going to happen.

Another sore point in the Kariba extension and Batoka Gorge projects is the issue of money owed to Lusaka by Harare following the disbandment of the Central African Power Company (CAPCO). CAPCO coordinated the construction of Kariba Dam and associated infrastructure back in the 60s. For the benefit of members, CAPCO is the predecessor company of the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA), whose primary task was to manage power generation and transmission from the Kariba Dam and was a creation of the Federation of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland which we all know was dissolved in 1963.

Some of the CAPCO assets like the imposing Livingstone Building on Samora Machel Avenue, just a stone’s throw away from where we are currently sitting, Mr. Speaker, is a case in point, it belongs to CAPCO. Most of the assets were domiciled in Zimbabwe. Harare hence, had to compensate its northern neighbour since the assets were acquired using resources from the two respective countries.

However, I wish at this juncture, to congratulate the former Minister of Finance and the Inclusive Government in general for during its tenure, a total of US$40 million out of the total US$70 million was remitted to Lusaka thus paving the way for the Batoka Gorge Project.
This development was confirmed by ZESA management at a media briefing and is captured in the Financial Gazette of 16th August, 2013.

INVESTMENT

Generation
Mr. Speaker Sir, there has not been any meaningful investment in the power sector in the past 30 years as highlighted above. The shareholder has not put in any money for capital projects and there has been no incentive in the sector attractive enough to lure private investors.
The industry is highly regulated and for a long time until fairly recently, the sub economic tariff put such a burden on ZESA that no suitor in their right frame of business mind would put money in an industry which sold its products at below cost of production. Policy inconsistencies are also a matter of grave concern in the sector.

It is however, refreshing to note that the Inclusive Government bit the bullet and introduced a tariff that will make the industry viable and attractive to would-be investors. This has resulted in Independent Power Producers (IPPs) like Nyamingura in Mutasa which dispatches 1MW.
A quick comparison with the region shows that the Government of South Africa has put money and is in the process of constructing two power stations at Medupi and Kusile with a combined anticipated output of 9600 MW and these will be commissioned in the 2014.

Zambia, as mentioned earlier, is almost completing the project on the North bank with a capacity of 300 MW and Botswana, on the back of their lucrative diamond industry will be completing a 600 MW power station by the end of 2013. Maybe, the Botswana equivalence of our Zimbabwe Mining Development Commission (ZMDC) does not have the misfortune of a people equivalent to ours or to put it more figuratively, they are not blessed with officials with the capacity to stuff US$6 million in their back pocket as personal change at the expense of the nation. This level of corruption which shocked even the Head of State should be nipped in the bud and one is forced to ask why there has been no single arrest in the ZMDC saga after revelations that would make Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves look like angels.

The much talked about Batoka Gorge project is still at feasibility study stage and will take between five and seven years to commission after the commencement of civil works. It should be noted that the World Bank made available US$10 million for similar feasibility studies which commenced in September of 1991 according to a report in ZESA’s internal magazine, The Megawatt Bulletin of December of the same year. Batoka would have a capacity of 1 266 MW as envisaged during that period. It is curious that today, 22 years later, the same project is still at feasibility study stage.

In order to attract investment into the sector, Government must show seriousness by using our natural resources to secure borrowings and invest in the sector. It is actually laughable that ZESA is currently working on a generation project in Gaerezi. When commissioned, the Gaerezi project will inject about 35 MW into the grid.

This is what indigenisation and economic empowerment should be encouraging private citizens to do and not for a whole state enterprise, the size of ZESA, underwritten by Government with an asset base running into billions to undertake such small projects. Projects like Gaerezi would ordinarily fall under Industrial Practice Programmes just like the 1MW project at Nyamingura mentioned earlier.

The problems of ZESA are not new; The Herald of 18th September, 1991 had a headline which read, ‘Condoms Save Day for ZESA.’ According to the story, Hwange Power Station was facing such a critical shortage of spare parts that technicians were using condoms as substitutes for instruments to measure pressure. This was only discovered by a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee after a tour of the power station. For ZESA, it was a laughing matter and yet the nation was on the brink of being plunged into darkness. It is for this same reason that I am calling this Parliament to investigate ZESA.

ZESA decadents are highlighted by the reported stand-off between the state enterprise and Green Fuel Company over the construction of a US$100 000 transmission line to wheel 6 MW from Chisumbanje Plant into the national grid. In the long term, the Chisumbanje Plant will increase its output to 18 Megawats.

It took a whole Cabinet Minister, the current Cabinet Minister to preside over this child- play where ZESA and the Green Fuel Company were haggling over just US$100 000. This stand-off betrays both lack of policy in the sector and lack of seriousness on the part of the power utility and the shareholder.

To show how the issue of power is trivialised by those tasked to avail it to us, the Financial Gazette of today, Thursday, 17 October, 2013, reports that Green Fuel was represented at this supposedly high profile meeting by their Chief Executive Officer, Billy Rautenbach whilst ZESA saw it fit to send only a Regional Manager who could not make executive decisions and had to defer decisions to head office in Harare.

For the benefit of members to appreciate in layman’s terms what a megawatt can do, I will explain. At full throttle, Harare needs up to 400 Megawatts a day and Manicaland Province would need about 200 Megawatts. I will go on to transmission. The power deficit narrative in Zimbabwe suggests that an increase in generation capacity is the panacea to our shortages.

What is conveniently forgotten is that there is need to transmit the generated power from the source of generation to substations, and the distribution of the same power from substations to the consumers. No one seems to care about these two very important subsectors of the electricity supply industry that is transmission and distribution.

If today, Zimbabwe had to generate all the power required at Kariba and Hwange, the transmission grid and the distribution network would not be able to transfer it efficiently to the consumer. The reason is that, Zimbabwe’s transmission grid and the distribution networks were designed to carry only so much load. Any increase in generation should hence be matched by a corresponding enhancement of the transmission grid and an equal extension of the distribution network. This has not been done.

Failure to match the former with the latter two, results in what we call faults and power cuts because the transmission or the distribution network cannot carry the load. What has happened in most of the past 33 years since independence is that, new consumers are simply connected to the existing network. A typical example is the sprawling dormitory town of Chitungwiza.All the additional residential and industrial consumers since 1985 are simply lumped onto the existing network. This results in network overload and obvious breakdowns.

I will go on to talk about flight of manpower Mr. Speaker Sir. ZESA has become the training ground for the regions and the world. All regional power utilities employ a ZESA trained engineer or technician at very senior levels. There is not a single power utility in the region that does not employ a former ZESA employee at the level of director and above. The brain drain is as a result of poor working conditions and uncompetitive salaries. In the past 15 years, ZESA has lost some of the best engineers that this region has ever produced.

Some competent engineers have been dismissed as scapegoats for Government bungling. Between 2004 and 2011, ZESA lost several highly qualified engineers and technicians but I will confine myself to the 25 Chartered Electrical Engineers that I know personally because I worked with them as a General Manager of one of the departments at ZESA. Of the 25, 12 are holders of Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering, in addition to the BSc obtained at the University of Zimbabwe. Sixteen are holders of either MBA or MBL in addition to the MSc or BSc in Engineering.

After leaving ZESA, most of the above mentioned personnel have been snapped by regional utilities. Mr. Speaker, The Ministry of Energy and Power Development has recorded one of the highest turnovers of ministers since independence and this bears testimony to this. In all, the Ministry has engaged and disengaged not less than 18 ministers. Only a handful was good. The rest were quite unhelpful.

Mr. Speaker, I will talk now on what I see as the role of Government. Ministers should be seized with policy-direction matters and stop making operational pronouncements. Operational matters like how and when a fault would be rectified should be left to management.

There may be a lot of political mileage to be derived from delving intotechnical issues as they make a minister appear hands-on. The down side to this, however Mr. Speaker Sir, is that some sectors, like the electricity supply industry, are highly technical and the Minister not so technically inclined, and unfortunately, most of them are not, cannot make pronouncements on operational matters without the risk of looking stupid because as they say, “The devil is in the detail”, and in electricity there is too much detail.

My recommendation is that, Government should adopt the culture that ministers who fail to deliver in their current portfolios must be recalled and appointed to lesser demanding portfolios or be made ministers without particular mandates. I am not saying that ministers should be technocrats, but they should exhibit a certain threshold of appreciation of issues in their sectors. We do not see that in the electricity supply industry. It is not resident.

Mr. Speaker, Zimbabwe is one of the few countries where mines on the one hand and power and energy on the other, are housed in separate ministries for strategic reasons, and seeing as coal, gas and oil are extracted from the earth, these make up energy and power. Mines, Energy and Power should be housed together and precious metals like gold, platinum and even diamonds can be dealt with in a separate ministry like a Ministry of Precious Metals like they have in other countries.

Zimbabwe is the only country in the region where the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Mines or Energy and Mines are housed in separate ministries. An IPP wanting to invest in a thermal operation for example, has to deal with the Ministry of Energy as much as they have to deal with the Ministry of Mines for the coal and the Ministry of Water for all the three vital inputs into power stations.

Mr. Speaker Sir, maximum demand customers like Sables and ZIMASCO cannot switch on their plants because doing so without guaranteed power supply will destroy the integrity of their machines.

The Ministry of Mines, as a recommendation must put policies into place and allow management to operate freely, but this is not the case. When a Minister is appointed Minister of Energy, they are synonymous with a ZESA Chief Executive. They will tell you when a fault has occurred in Chitungwiza and when it will be rectified and that should not be the case.

Today, the network in Harare alone requires about $24 million for it to be able to distribute power effectively in Harare and $24 million Mr. Speaker Sir, is not a lot of money. As the previous speaker, Hon. Temba Mliswa has said, the money that is being splashed on luxury cars could well go into ZESA and the network would be improved.

Mr. Speaker Sir, having said that, I wish to thank you for giving me this time. I rest my case.

Thank you.

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