Maravi

Zesco's countrywide power outage

Zesco's countrywide power outage
By Editor
Monday January 21, 2008 [06:56]

The countrywide power outage Zambians experienced on Saturday cannot be looked at as an isolated incident caused by natural forces outside the control of any human being. This is the third time in the last three years that we have experienced such a phenomenon. What happened on Saturday night has never happened in the history of the country except once during the late 1980s when there was a problem with a cable which was damaged.

Even in this case, the people who had installed the cable – the Swedes – accepted responsibility, saying they didn’t think the cable could have such a short life span. The problem was not blamed on Zesco or its management.

The technical problems that Zesco has been experiencing in the last two years cannot totally be divorced from the incompetence of its management, they can be said to be a result of incompetence on the part of those running Zesco.

For such a problem, Zesco was not expected to take more than seven hours to restore power countrywide. Somewhere somehow, the operations were not conducted properly or efficiently – that was certainly not the best that could be done.

This is the cost of nepotism. What is happening is the cost of patronage. What is happening now is that most of our parastatals are run by people appointed on the basis of patronage. It is either they are the appointing authorities’ or ministers’ tribesmen or they are relatives or they come from the same province or district.

If someone wants to give favours to his or her tribesmen or relatives, it is better to avoid bringing such people to highly complex technical fields or organisations like Zesco. We need competent people to run the institutions of the state and organisations owned and controlled by the government.

Corrective measures have to be taken. Someone has to evaluate the cost of this to the economy and the country in general. We are very lucky not to have lost lives on the mines. We are actually very happy that nobody died on the Copperbelt. Things could have been a very different story.

But we shouldn’t forget that until recently the Zesco system was one of the best-run in Africa, and was among the world’s best. Experts in this field used to come from Europe to see and learn from how the Zesco system was running. But now this system is destroyed. Why are things happening suddenly? We shouldn’t forget that having a degree is one thing and experience is another.

We have to realise that this system doesn’t work on words or public relations statements, it works on experience; it works on following the procedures; it works on knowing what system should be out at a particular time and what should be replaced. We are very lucky that the Copperbelt Energy Corporation had access to Congolese power and was able to generate a bit of its own, otherwise this would have been worse than the Mufulira mine disaster.

Let us learn to pay a lot of attention to the way we run the affairs of our country and the institutions we have created. This is our country and nobody will look after it for us. The success or failure of this country lies squarely on our shoulders, we the citizens of this country. We therefore shouldn’t try to run away from responsibility.

We must have competent people to run the affairs of our country and to look after such sensitive institutions as Zesco.

If the problem is nepotism, let’s kill it before we destroy our parastatals and eventually or consequently our country.

Assuming Copperbelt Energy Corporation did not import power from the Democratic Republic of Congo, what would have happened on the mines? People could have died in very large numbers, there was going to be a huge disaster. The power imported from Congo was used to evacuate miners to areas of safety, otherwise there wasn’t enough power for operations.

And such a long countrywide power outage can pose a serious security risk to the country. Thieves, thugs and opportunists of all hues, including terrorists, could terrorise the country and disturb its peace and stability. Many of our people could lose their household property to thieves who like operating under the cover of darkness.

There is no doubt that the process for the restoration of power was not promptly carried out; the operations were not very successful initially. However, the most important thing is the restoration of power. It is nice to explain things but it is always better to be very clear about the system itself.

There is need to look at the operations of Zesco critically and assess the capacity and competence of its management in addition to other factors. If this is not done promptly, worse things are yet to come; we ain’t seen nothing yet. The future of Zesco should not be left totally to the whims of its management and to those who appointed them because the interests in this enterprise go far beyond that. Every effort should be made that this enterprise becomes a community of persons.

If our country is to move forward, honesty and hard work is demanded of all of us. Those who work for Zesco have a duty to give the nation efficient and conscientious work. It is said that what a single ant brings to the anthill is very little; but what a great hill is built when each one does their proper share of the work!

Let us not wait until problems pile up and cause a lot of trouble before trying to solve them. What we need is an enthusiastic but calm state of mind and intense but orderly work. In this world, things are complicated and are decided by many factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not just from one.

When we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only way to meaningfully analyse and solve problems.

It is well known that when you do anything, unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well. If a person wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his work.

Labels: NEPOTISM, PARASTATALS, ZESCO

posted by MrK @ 8:57 AM