“We have short memories. When we have good rainfall, we forget about what happened the previous year and we start enjoying, we stop what we planned,” CUTS International Zambia board member Sajeev Nair has charged.
In his remarks at a public discussion forum on load shedding Thursday night, Nair said that despite indications that something like this would happen, we stop implementing things after good rains. “I think that’s where the issue is.”
He said for a long time, there have been discussions about competition in the power sector.
“We’ve been discussing having one utility doing all the things—producing, distributing, supporting the various consumer bases. When we did a study somewhere around 2001/02 the same issue came up—the issue of a utility having a monopoly.”
“Why don’t we have so many players coming into the field? Competition is important but time and again we discuss the need for competition in this sector, we discuss the need for proactive regulation in the sector but then what we don’t see is the implementation aspect, we are very slow,” Nair stated.
He highlighted net metering, which he said was an old technology of some 20 to 30 years old, that has been going on in other countries, including the developing world, for years and years. Meanwhile, the government has only just enabled its implementation in Zambia.
He said discussing solutions to the current power crisis was more important than tabulating the problems it has brought and reminded the audience that it was not the first time Zambia was experiencing load shedding but what made this episode peculiar was how rampant and diverse it was.
“It’s not the first time, we’ve been going on and off, since 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018…what makes the 2024 power situation peculiar is that it is so rampant, so diverse and it also has a far-reaching impact. We’ve never experienced this load shedding before,” said Nair.
