WHY DECLARE AN ELECTRICITY EMERGENCY?
September 2024
Fellow citizens, yesterday the New Heritage Party (NHP), issued a statement advising the the UPND Government to evoke emergency measures as one of the several immediate interventions that are urgently required to help the country avoid falling into a quicksand situation with our economy generally and the livelihoods of the poor majority of Zambians especially.
NHP does not issue statements for popularity’s sake. We are well researched and patriotic. We have received numerous cases of the severe disruptions and mayhem that this current power deficit is causing in individual households, in industry and in hospitals of all places, where now even potable clean safe drinking water is not available.
People are suffering! This situation is intolerable! This shows incompetence and poor leadership! Guess who agrees with us in this assessment – yes, you guessed right, it is no other than President Hakainde Hichilema himself who just a little while ago when we were faced with a similar but less severe power deficit when he was an opposition leader stated that the power deficit we faced as a nation, was as a result of leadership incompetence and failure.
Our advise, therefore, to President HH and the UPND for the evocation of emergency measures is not an academic exercise, it is advice founded on the understanding that unless drastic steps are taken domestically to mobilise the financial, material, logistical and human resources required for a serious focussed and well coordinated international effort to get us out of this fast deteriorating morass, as a result of the energy crisis, negative unintended consequences including social unrest is a real risk for the nation. This is not a partisan matter for point scoring by anyone. We are all affected negatively by this lack of electricity even though we know that others are less so, at their individual level, than the majority of our people.
In simple terms, what we are asking Government to do, is to operationalize a ” Marshall Plan” which will enable the country to access expertise, resources and international solidarity to help us out of this terrible situation before it is too late. Zambia is member of a number of multilateral institutions including the World Bank, IMF, ADB, COMESA Bank, and others. We need these institutions to step up and play their rightful role, especially the World Bank, which although was initially set up to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, has a new mandate to foster the development of emerging countries such ours. All these institutions have been collecting money from Zambia and continue to do so, it is time the Zambians had a return on these investments.
This is the surest way out of our quagmire in the short term, not this ” Mickey Mouse” approach that is being taken by the UPND government so far.
This country belongs to us all.
CHISHALA KATEKA
President – New Heritage Party
Madam, will a ‘marshall plan” bring immediate rain fall and immediately increase the level of kariba dam to provide enough water for power generation.obviously you will be able to inform the public how this will occur because you have thought it thru enough to post the statement thst you have.
In the past I used to think Ms. Chishala Kateka would provide a good alternative to the country as an opposition party but it seems I was wrong. Ever since she joined UKA she is not to making sense anymore in the things she says. How will declaring an electricity emergency bring immediate relief to the people in terms of loadshedding? Electricity is not like food where you can get it anywhere and feed the people in need of it, you need to have infrastructure to transmit. For starters, the drought did not just affect Zambia but almost all countries in southern africa, therefore, there are very few countries which have surplus power which they can export to us and those with surplus have limited portion to export hence the challenge we are having at the moment. So even if we had all the money to import electricity, we.can’t do it because there is not enough out there to import. If she does not know, the current electricity deficit in Zambia is over 1,200MW, which country has such an excess power in our electricity interconnect pool? Only Tanzania is able to provide up to 400MW of power but they are not yet in the electricity interconnect pool so we can’t import power from there but the line is now under construction to allow for future importation should the need arise in the future. Please Ms. Kateka, rethink your position and start offering viable alternative solutions like you used to do in the past before joining UKA.
Cos unshaved mwankoles like you , very educated but can’t even manufacture a tooth pick within Zambia. That is why the emergency. Cos if you , yourself could make a tooth pick or a tooth brush or even better, A Comb to comb your dirty ugly hair, then someone else could get an inspiration to manufacture a generator or solar panel withing Zambia, right?