Blackout disrupts Parliament
Power failure yesterday disrupted business in the National Assembly with some members of Parliament (MPs) pouring insults at the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) which is implementing extended power rationing.
During the outage, opposition legislators were overheard describing the blackout as “charecteristics of the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP]” administration.
“This is indeed DPP,” shouted some of the opposition MPs.
The outage, which lasted for three minutes, has been described as normal despite Parliament Secretariat writing to Escom asking for preferential supply of power during its business hours.
“This is normal process, but we realised that power outages could cause problems because, first of all, our genset is not automatic and this can create a lapse of events. But, of course, we wondered why the power went out. Maybe you should ask Escom,” said Parliament chief public relations officer Leonard Mengezi.
He said the power backup at Parliament has a technical fault that requires people to manually switch it off or on.
Escom public relations manager Kitty Chingota asked for a written questionnaire on the issue. However, as we went to press last night, she was yet to respond.
Escom is implementing massive load shedding to consumers following reduced generation capacity resulting from low water levels in Lake Malawi and the Shire River, home to 90 percent of Escom’s hydro-electric power stations, because of low rainfall last year.
