Gambia: Dancing for the Electricity
By Mbaye B. Sarr & Mohammed L. Sillah, Courtesy of The Gambia Journal :
Yes the increment of the country's electricity production capacity is always welcome news. And given the chronic electricity blackouts of the recent past, the masses have the right to jubilate, but much more so, they have the right to be told of the truth that affects their lives.
Friday 8th December, President Jammeh led dancing crowds of his supporters to welcome the arrival of the third electrical power generator to come in as many weeks. Unlike the first two, one of which arrived while the Gambian leader was on an official visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the 6.5 MW generator had the luck to have the presidential libation water poured upon it and thousands of dancing APRC party supporters accompanying it to the Kotu Power Station, about seven kilometers away from the Banjul seaport.
But lest Jammeh and his dancers forget, in the thunderous din of the celebrations, the country's electricity problem is not only a matter of bottlenecks in production but, more urgently in the transmission and distribution of power. A study funded by the Danish aid agency, DANIDA in the early 1990s revealed the worst ever recorded technical losses on the Gambia's electricity grid. Another study commissioned by the French Caisse Francaise did not only confirm the astounding 40% losses a decade later, it revealed that the matter was getting worst.
Some of the transmission lines are as old as the River Gambia and need urgent repairs, if not total overhaul. The same goes with the transformers whose losses are also considered to be phenomenal. We are not talking about the new generators yet, because few know anything about the terms and conditions of the procurement of the generators, not to mention their technical specifications and dates of manufacture and any subsequent runtime record. All we know is that the generators, contrary to what we had been told, were brought by the Global Management Services, a company that was formed and whose name was coined around the generators. We also know that the company's sole proprietor, the Lebanese Mr. Muhamed Bazsi, had been a long-time supplier of fuel oil to the National Electricity and Water Company, NAWEC.
Where DANIDA, Caisse Francaise, Baywater, the South African multi-national ESCOM, had all got turned off by the huge technical losses any viable expansion would have to tackle, Mr. Bazsi has come, looked and decided to invest. All the others came sniffed and proposed that investment in transmission and distribution equipment so as to minimize the technical losses is the only prudent first step, but Mr. Barzi and his Global Management System and its twin Global Trading Company have decided to make do and stay. What was done is that they have made sure the country's electricity laws and institutional framework are tailored enough to cater for his profiteering ventures. Earlier this year, the Independent Power Producer's Bill was hurriedly passed through the National Assembly, two of NAWEC's directors who perhaps for patriotic reasons, opposed the deal with Barzi, were removed, arrested, detained, charged and left to the mercy of the slow-motion legal process and thereby dispensed with.
DANIDA and co had argued that boosting production would only increase losses. A production of 19 MWH six years ago when the others were here on feasibility studies meant losses of 7.6 MWH of power. Now with the available capacity of 35 MWH the losses have been nearly doubled to 14 MWH. Who would pay for the losses they had simply asked? Mr. Bazsi on the other hand was only concerned with protecting his companies from bearing even some of the losses, not who will cover them. He made sure that he is paid at the station-gate at the point of production not at consumption, at the distribution point when 40 percent has already been lost. To make sure his paymaster NAWEC will not get broke, he has imposed on NAWEC a tariff increment of 25% and a new pre-paid meter system will replace the current one. So who is going to pay for the losses? We the tax payers and consumers, of course.
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