When we, and a ton of other online publications, wrote about the impending darkness. ZESA was quick to blame us and social media for spreading lies. There was no load shedding going on as they were still working on a schedule; they said. Well, turns out they flat out lied and not for the first time either.
Here are the facts
The load shedding schedule we published is correct never mind what ZESA says. In fact, over the weekend the power utility finally released their schedule. Here is a hint, it is exactly the same schedule we published last week.
ZESA also solely blames the drought of 2018-19 season for the power shortages. That is not completely true. Kariba’s power has not been enough for close to a decade and a half. A sensible company would have invested in alternatives. Despite state media jingles about how Kariba and Hwange were being upgraded, that has not changed. In fact statistics show that both have reduced their power generating capacity in the past years.
Meanwhile, in 2013 the government promised to turn to solar. Solar makes a lot of sense and would certainly benefit from a drought. After lots of corruption, the tender was awarded to a company that has zero capacity to see the project through. The project, just like all government projects of note, is in limbo.
The government and ZESA are entirely to blame for this.
Here is the schedule
Okay, that was a bit of an angry rant and not very scholarly. Anyway here is the national wide schedule:
ZETDC-2019-LOADSHEDDING-SCHEDULE-PORTABLE-compressed
For now powercuts can last up to 10 hours a day. However, ZESA, has gleefully promised to increase this should power generation fall again. There is a doom prophesy saying Kariba willl not be producing any power by October of this year.
What can you do about it?
We are going to be publishing a series of articles that will help you in these difficult times. However the answer is solar. If you are a large company you might want to check out Distributed Power Africa as an alternative to ZESA.
You can read more about power generation in Zimbabwe under our Geography Notes
