IN its latest economic update on Zimbabwe released this week, the World Bank painted a grim picture regarding the country’s electricity situation.
“World Bank estimates suggest that Zimbabwe’s power shortages cost the country a total of 6,1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) per year, comprising 2,3% of GDP in generation inefficiencies and excessive network losses, and 3,8% of GDP on the downstream costs of unreliable energy,” said the global bank.
The Breton Woods institution further points out: “Electricity deficits are particularly damaging for the mining sector, given its highly energy-intensive characteristics, so that unreliable and expensive electricity supplies reduce the margins of existing operations and weigh heavily on the feasibility evaluations for expansions and new projects.”
The international lender goes on to indicate that by 2030, the country’s electricity demand will have shot to 5 177 megawatts (MW) from the 1 950MW estimated in 2022, which will call for massive investment in power generation.
And to achieve universal electricity access by 2030, Zimbabwe needs to increase connections to 537 000 per year from 25 000 in 2020.
Given this situation, one may be forgiven to conclude that Zimbabwe’s electricity situation is exposing the country’s poor economic policies which are failing to adequately boost power supply.
With only seven years left to 2030, a year the country is hoping to have attained an upper-middle-income status, which include universal access to electricity, it is increasingly becoming fallacious to imagine that this will ever be achieved.
If Zimbabwe wishes to achieve its 2030 developmental target, it should earnestly start investing in upgrading and developing new sources of energy.
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Lip service as far as providing enough electricity to the country’s fast growing population will be the biggest letdown on the part of government.
This means that henceforth, government power projects such as the enduring Hwange Thermal Power Station expansion should provide us with tangible evidence of efforts to improve the power situation.
Otherwise talk is cheap and it will expose the folly in government’s development agenda and the redundancy in its programmes such as the National Development Strategy 1.
What makes some of us really sceptical that Zimbabwe will not emerge from the woods anytime soon as far as power generation is concerned is the fact that for the past five years close to 100 independent solar power producers have been licensed, but very few, if any, are supplying something to the national power grid.
This is just one area needing serious government monitoring if ever we are going to get anywhere as a nation in terms of electricity supply.
