Matola meeting EGENCO officials today
President Lazarus Chakwera says he has deployed the Minister of Energy Ibrahim Matola to hold meetings with the heads of ESCOM and EGENCO to get to the bottom of nationwide power outages.
Chakwera said this in a Facebook post this morning following nationwide blackouts lasting 12 hours which hit Malawi over the weekend.
Specifically, Matola is to get to the root cause of the system shutdown that resulted in the nationwide blackout over the weekend.
“I have deployed the Minister of Energy to hold meetings with the Heads of ESCOM and EGENCO to get to the bottom of the cause of the system shutdown that resulted in a nationwide blackout over the weekend,” said Chakwera.
He added that the minister is also to track the progress being made on rehabilitating the Kapichira Power Plant which was damaged over seven months ago after heavy rains hit Malawi.
The damage at Kapichira led to the start of 6-hour daily blackouts which intensified over the past weekend. Malawi borrowed K60 billion from the World Bank to rehabilitate the power station.
Meanwhile, Matola this morning met the officials of the Electricity Generation Company (EGENCO) in Blantyre to discuss the blackout issues that have been hitting the country as assigned by the President.
Matola said an inquiry is already in the process to find root causes of the power outages and a statement regarding the progress will be made by the end of today.
“The inquiry will lead into what is happening in the energy sector, whether technical or sabotage,” Matola said.
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