No water, no power and soon no more food, either?
No water, no power and soon no more food, either?
Almost all of Zambia’s electricity comes from the hydroelectric power station on Kariba Dam. That dam is running dry.
Olga Manda in Lusaka
Pressure is mounting on President Hakainde Hichilema to declare Zambia’s prolonged energy crisis a national emergency.
The country is suffering one of its worst droughts in two decades, which has adversely affected its power supply. Water levels in the mega Kariba Dam complex, Zambia’s main energy source, plunged to just 7.68%. Even with strict rationing, Zambia has only eight weeks of power supply remaining before a total blackout.
The state-run power utility, Zesco, has rationed power through rolling cuts, also known as load-shedding. Initially, the cuts lasted eight hours a day; now it’s 21 hours a day for most users.
Hichilema and his government have called on citizens and businesses to seek alternative energy sources, specifically solar, and even produce extra to sell back to the state company. But over 60% of the country’s 20-million people are poor, and 48% live in extreme poverty, the latest government statistics show.
This poverty is being exacerbated by crop failure, also a result of the drought, which has left more than 10-million people facing acute hunger.
Zesco, for the first time in the country’s 60-year history, recently announced plans to turn off the turbines at its Kariba North Bank Power Station later in September due to the depletion of usable water in the reservoir. Neighbouring Zimbabwe, which also generates electricity from the Kariba Dam power system, is facing similar challenges.
A national emergency
In practice, authorities are already operating in emergency mode. Zesco says it has bought 23 generators to place in the markets of the capital city Lusaka, so that a portion of the economy – food supply in particular – continues to function.
Hichilema’s critics say he should declare a state of emergency.
New Heritage Party leader Chishala Kateka said declaring a national disaster would enable the country to mobilise and unlock financial, material and human resources for dealing expeditiously with the electricity crisis.
If Hichilema does so, it will be the second national disaster he declares this year. In April, the president declared the drought a national disaster and launched an international aid appeal for the millions of people facing extreme hunger. With support from donors, the government expanded school feeding programs and reintroduced food for work and emergency cash transfer programs in the worst-hit districts.
But presiding over national disasters is not the message with which Hichilema won the presidency. He promised economic recovery. Declaring another disaster might be a bridge too far for his political brand.
He appears to understand the gravity of the situation. “We need to make energy available for irrigation to avoid an economic shutdown. An economic shutdown means lesser growth, more difficulties,” the president told a visiting delegation from the World Bank. “Our growth projections were that this year we were going to grow to four percent. But because of this variable, we are now talking about 2%. We don’t know where we will settle.”
The president has tried to draw attention to the role of climate change in creating the current disaster, in a push to get the World Bank to fast-track emergency finance for Zambia.
This finance would come from a bucket of funds that the lender calls the Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option. It allows member countries to get emergency loans in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
The country’s immediate future is riding on this request: given that Zambia is already in debt distress, it is unclear where else the money could come from.