Malawians enduring hours without electricity have been told to accept the darkness now for the promise of a more reliable power supply later.
Forum for National Development (FND) chairperson Flyson Chodzi has defended Malawi’s current electricity blackouts, saying consumers should endure the temporary inconvenience if it means avoiding prolonged outages in the future.
Chodzi was responding to former Vice President Michael Usi, who recently questioned why electricity blackouts tend to be worse under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administrations.
Usi also called on President Peter Mutharika to seek advice from former presidents Lazarus Chakwera and Joyce Banda on how they handled electricity challenges during their respective administrations.
But Chodzi has offered a different explanation, arguing that the current power cuts are necessary to allow electricity equipment to undergo maintenance and prevent a more serious crisis.
He said the previous approach of keeping equipment running continuously to avoid blackouts had resulted in generators being overworked, with machines that were designed to operate for about six hours being run for up to 12 hours.
According to Chodzi, by June 2025 only three of 20 generators were operational, which he attributed to prolonged use without adequate maintenance.
He further claimed that the shortage of foreign exchange had made it difficult for ESCOM and EGENCO to procure spare parts, leaving the institutions to improvise when equipment developed faults.
Chodzi said the current situation therefore requires Malawians to accept scheduled power cuts as part of efforts to restore the system, arguing that the alternative could be much longer outages.
“It’s a simple equation. We either suffer now and enjoy later, or we enjoy now and forever have misery. Which one would you prefer?” Chodzi said.
He said the current four-hour outages could eventually be reduced to two hours before being eliminated if the maintenance programme proceeds as planned.
Chodzi also defended the approach as preferable to the prolonged blackouts Malawi has experienced in the past, saying consumers would be better off enduring shorter scheduled outages than facing 14-hour or even longer periods without electricity.
He likened the situation to maintaining a vehicle, saying a car has to be taken off the road temporarily for servicing if it is to continue operating reliably.
Chodzi’s remarks come amid continued public concern over electricity supply, with Usi’s criticism putting the political debate over the country’s power challenges back into focus.
