By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara
The power cut that visited the First Lady, Fatima Jabbe-Bio recently in Kenema City at a time she was engaged in a radio interview, leaving the programme off the air could be an embarrassing experience that should put the energy authorities on toes, doubling efforts in the drive for sustainable supply of electricity in Sierra Leone.
Reliable electricity supply steadily drives national development and augments human growth, a reason why the energy sector must be given an all-out attention by its handlers and the government. Efforts have been made to improve the sector over the years, but malicious corruption by few individuals to get rich quick at the expense of the nation is etched as one of the cankerworms eating deep into the fabrics and progress of the country’s energy sector.
To increase electricity generation, enhance existing thermal plants, rebuild and enhance the existing distribution networks, the government of Sierra Leone allocated a budget of $15.6 million in 2018, but more than six years down the line, progress made is nothing to write home about, even when development partners pledged an additional amount of $43.7 million in the same year, and it came after the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had provided $44.4 million grant in 2015 for a four-year program to improve the energy sector.
In October 2018, the International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) also signed a $40 million agreement to install a 50 MW solar power plant amid the anticipation that the demand for electricity would exceed 360MW by 2023. IDFC had also approved an additional $292 million of $412 million loan to improve the country’s energy sector, while ECOWAS provided another $40 million loan, all in an effort to improve the sector.
It, therefore, beats the imagination that though such collosal sums of money in dollars and others not mentioned here have been injected into the energy sector, the country still reels in persistent power cuts and prolonged blackouts, depicting how worsening the trend has become in present-day Sierra Leone, much to be desired in a poor country thought to be on the brink of collapse.
Meanwhile, EDSA under the tutelage of its Director General, Joe Lahai, is said to be the worse in history, in that even though the demand for electricity is high and consumers have been paying for the service regularly, the institution cannot effectively bankroll the generation of reliable electricity. This is sad to note, especially when reports say it’s all due to reasons not unconnected to entrenched corruption and the glaring mismanagement of the sector, resulting in the state losing huge income.
With nearly a billion dollar said to have so far been pumped into the energy sector without appreciable results, fears have been expressed by majority of Sierra Leoneans who think that the MCC grant in the sum of $480 million that the government has signed to actualise access to affordable and reliable electricity in the country may just turn out to be like throwing water on a duck’s back.
In the face of all the whopping sums of money being poured into the energy sector, EDSA authorities could make a blush in their faces, shamefully displaying their ineptitude with a press release to announce power outages at various strategic communities and urban settlements across the country, stemming from faulty underground medium-voltage (MV) cables, fallen poles, earth faults, and a broken MV jumper. This comes just after slamming the First Lady with power cuts in the radio studio in Kenema and interrupted her media programme in that part of the country. EDSA also informed the public about a fault on the Makama MV feeder that has affected seven secondary substations, reporting also about an additional fault on the 1.6 Mega Volt Ampere power transformer that necessitated a local load-shedding program in the area.
Blackouts in Sierra Leone have wreaked havoc on businesses and the daily lives of individuals to the extent of leaving many families losing their loved ones at various hospitals. This ugly trend reportedly left President Julius Maada Bio with no option but to serve as the protemporaneous Minister of Energy after axing Alhaji Kanja Sesay, and he still is, though no positive change has been seen to occur.