Escom’s costly wake-up call, customers’ pain

Information and communications technology (ICT) platforms are supposed to facilitate efficiency and ease in operations of businesses and all aspects of life. To date, technology has simplified business transactions and life in general, bringing convenience.

But then, technology also does fail and in the process costs businesses revenue and inconveniences customers. In some cases, lives have been lost due to operational failures of ICT or IT systems.

Closer home, from Sunday morning to Tuesday evening, electricity consumers in the country were unable to buy prepaid electricity tokens to top up power following the collapse of Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) vending machine. Escom said in a statement the platform would be restored after 48 hours which was Tuesday.

Now that the system has been restored, this should be the right moment for a sober look at the events surrounding the whole shutdown.

Communication is one critical area in such crisis, but Escom last updated its customers and stakeholders on the status on Sunday, April 16 after it occurred at 7.47am on Sunday. The statement had the usual ‘cover up’ tagline of “our engineers are working tirelessly to rectify the problem”.

But what happened? Does Escom not have a back-up or redundant server? These are some of the common questions people raised in various platforms, of course, at the expense of being labelled “Monday coaches”.

An Escom insider confided that the 48 hours period was set to enable some IT staff travel to the vendor in South Africa for unlocking after the vending system went into protection mode, locking itself in the process. Apparently, like is the case with the Malawi Traffic Information System (Maltis) at the Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services, the Escom vending system is “controlled” by the vendor or supplier in South Africa who keeps the reset password.

From the conversation, I got the feeling that the issue may be beyond password and trust. It could be there are outstanding licence fees which may not have been made due to the prevailing foreign exchange shortages in the country.

Engineering designs are made in such a way that there is a manual override to provide back-up in case of failure as it happened on Sunday. It happens with aeroplanes and many others innovations.

Cases of system shutdown have dogged the Escom vending platform for almost two decades now. Perhaps the latest case should move Escom to go full throttle investing in the revamping of the system to have an override that can allow consumers get tokens even if it means scratch cards. Better still, customers can be temporarily migrated to the post-paid billing platform and recover the revenue based on usage as they buy their prepaid.

Basic functionality of a system, in case of Escom, prepaid billing has to continue at all costs. Besides, next time there should also be some sense of urgency, not dismissing concerns or views expressed by others.

Each member of staff should also behave as a brand ambassador for Escom, in such a way responses like “even munthu amadwala [people do fall sick, what more a system]” as someone quoted an Escom employee at Magetsi House at City Centre in Lilongwe as having justified the system failure would be avoided. The staff should know that Escom provides a service for which people pay in exchange. It is not like they are doing customers a favour.

It is ironic that Escom complains of low revenue, yet it can afford the luxury to go three days without collecting revenue. The loss should be in excess of K2 billion.

Data or disaster recovery and business continuity plans are critical in any business. The system shutdown led to loss of revenue besides causing pain and inconvenience to customers. Escom should look at these issues seriously.