By Amin Kef Sesay
The other day, some little boys were watching a movie that they liked very much when suddenly the light started going on and off annoyingly. One of the boys said something that was extremely funny: “O my God, who has a cure for the Electricity Distribution and Supply Authority EDSA’s fits?”
The image of EDSA suffering from convulsion of the type that a person who has fits exhibits made everyone around to laugh.
The fun beside, EDSA has definitely much lately become a pain in the …for hundreds of thousands of electricity consumers across the entire length and breadth of the ever sprawling western area whose appetite for electricity consumption becomes bigger every day.
No doubt, very few people are convinced by EDSA’s latest explanation that the disruptive electricity supply in the western area for the past two weeks which many women especially grumble has cost them the loss of lots of perishable foods in the fridges and freezers and loss of incomes is due to lighting and thunder striking the transmission line from Bumbuna dam to Freetown.
What about all the other times before the past two weeks that EDSA had woefully failed to supply uninterrupted electricity to its customers who grumble bitterly that they buy top up but do not get current.
Fact of the matter is EDSA needs more and more generating capacity that as now does not seem to exist.
Even at that, we can safely say that more than half of western area houses are still not connected to the electricity grid.
And many areas that can boast electricity access and grid connectivity still face shortages and rolling blackouts due to lack of capacity, hampering growth and economic development.
The issues surrounding EDSA’s electricity shortages are multifaceted and include decades of neglect in building up country-wide infrastructure, a lack of international investment, poor regulatory frameworks and the difficulty surrounding bankability of power projects.
This ,however, is not to acknowledge that the Ministry of Energy, EDSA and EGTC are not working round the clock to get round the problem but do not seem to have adequate capacity to transform the country’s electricity framework in terms of regulatory policy and investment and strategically building up both generation capacity and transmission infrastructure.
In this light, how soon can we look forward to not only uninterrupted electricity supply but more than 70 percent of Freetown and the rest of the country connected to grids?
Truth of the matter is that, the sector for long has been plagued by neglect, an unwieldy bureaucracy, mismanagement, lack of appropriate technical and mechanical capacity to keep machines running well, leading to lack of international investment in a sector that holds huge domestic economic growth potential.
The primary risk for lack of private sector investment in the country’s energy sector is not technology or market risk but the infamous regulatory and political risk. The private sector steers clear of investment because of the political and regulatory risk associated with power projects. In this situation, the only investors tend to be development institutions lending directly to Government.
An even more complex issue to tackle and part of the overall issue of indebtedness is actual bankability of individual projects due to servicing a poor population. Quite simply, many consumers cannot afford to pay full-price for electricity, which means the price of electricity is heavily subsidized.
As such, the World Economic Forum stated in a report that, “Without heat, light and power you cannot build or run the factories and cities that provide goods, jobs and homes, nor enjoy the amenities that make life more comfortable and enjoyable. Energy is the ‘oxygen’ of the economy and the life-blood of growth, particularly in the mass industrialization phase…”
In terms of economic development, electricity outages (not including lack of access) has a huge downward pull on GDP growth, as well as losses in productivity, competitiveness and employment which are difficult to measure numerically.
