Our problems are bigger than Escom

When I was a student at Robert Blake Secondary School at Kongwe Mission in the latter half of the 1970s, power was supplied to the school, and to the entire mission station, from a mini-hydro plant on Lingadzi River. This plant had been constructed by the early South African missionaries who saw sense in damming the perennial river and utilising it as a source of both water and power.

It was then that I got to have some appreciation of what it meant to generate power using water. In the rainy season, the dam would forcefully run over, the river bringing tree branches and other debris into the pipes that led to the turbine. Our head teacher, Mr. Retief, would be forced to shut down the tiny plant for some time.

Hydro-power generation can be very clean and poses virtually no threat to the environment. But that is as far as the advantages go. When nature runs wild, as it often does, hydro-power generation is extremely vulnerable.

I do not work for Escom and I am as displeased as everyone else about frequent power cuts. I suspect that the levels of efficiency within Escom are not where they should ideally be. But I think to regard Escom as idiots, as people who do not care or do not know what they are doing is extreme, untruthful and unhelpful.

Laziness and lack of seriousness at work are problems that rock all sectors in Malawi. In law, they say he who comes to equity must do so with clean hands. You certainly cannot have people from the civil service, for example, where the culture is so retrogressive in as far as productivity is concerned, point fingers at Escom as if their own house were in order. If Escom had a culture similar to that in the civil service, we would by now be telling our children, under candlelight, stories like “Once upon a time, these bulbs used to give light”.

Even the Malawian private sector does not fare much better than Escom, in my view. Laziness is the order of the day. If people can have the slightest excuse to stay away from work or to report to work late, they will not hesitate to do that. Theft is rampant, deceit is commonplace. And yet when the same people have no power, they quickly become saints and isolate Escom as the personification of all things evil.

I get inspired by footballers. They always feel like they belong to the football pitch. If a player gets injured, he gets treated very quickly on the touchline and goes back onto the pitch. Most of those injuries are serious enough to warrant a recommendation for bed rest from a doctor or indeed some hospitalisation. Footballers have no business going on bed rest; they would rather go back to the pitch. But in formal employment, the slightest headache, real or imagined, will keep an employee from work for days. In Malawi, that is.

True, Escom has problems, just like the rest of the sectors in Malawi. The only difference is that Escom’s product is in everybody’s home and when it is cut off, emotions rise very quickly.

The truth is that if Malawi is to be free from the power woes it faces currently, it must explore and invest in other modes of power generation than hydro plants. As noted earlier, hydro-power generation is extremely vulnerable to the ravages of nature. The massive environmental degradation that has taken place in much of Malawi does not help matters. I do not think that the environmental degradation has been caused by Escom. We all are as guilty as Escom of causing the current power problems.

The mini-hydro plant at Kongwe, by the way, has been decommissioned and rendered non-functional for decades now. The ravages of nature were far too great.

I would urge us, as a nation, to seriously explore alternative means of power generation like coal, geothermal, solar or even nuclear plants. Within our borders, we have coal deposits for possible coal-fired plants and uranium deposits for possible nuclear plants. Only our imagination will limit us.