Good news to all Malawians. That feeling we had during Joyce Banda’s two-year reign where the electricity problem was resolved is now back. It is now almost a month with us Malawians enjoying very stable electricity supply across the country contrary to the incessant load-sheddings that Malawians began to get accustomed to.
According to Egenco, they are fully and back generating electricity at normal capacity. The good news in turning things around as far as the electricity issues are concerned commenced on Wednesday, 5 April 2023, at exactly 17:45 hours when Egenco’s Generation Control Centre (GCC) flashed an update that read, “Kapichira G1 is recommissioned and loaded…” and about half-an-hour later, GCC also reported, “Kapichira G3 on load.”
What this meant was that after 13 months of outage, Kapichira Power Station was back online.
In his reaction, EGENCO Chief Executive Officer, William Liabunya, was speechless.
“When the first machine came back online yesterday, people here at Kapichira and across the whole EGENCO were filled with joy – we danced, ululated and others even shed tears. We couldn’t contain it, having delivered what Malawians have been expecting for a long time,” said Liabunya in an interview.
And exactly one week later, the Generation Control Centre also reported the recommissioning of the third machine from Kapichira.
The last machine has been restored today Wednesday, 10 May 2023, bringing all four machines at Kapichira back to operation.
Kapichira Power Station has been out of operation since 24th January 2022, after its dam structures were severely damaged by Cyclone Ana, taking 129.6 Megawatts (MW), about 23% of the country’s power capacity, away from the grid.
Now that all four power-generating machines from the Station have been recommissioned, 129.6MW has been restored to the national grid.
Following the restoration of Kapichira, Liabunya said that the power scarcity problems that the country has been experiencing will now be a thing of the past.
“Now that we are generating sufficient power, the country will forget about load shedding,” said Liabunya.
Although Kapichira Power Station has been out for more than a year, it has taken EGENCO three months to bring back power generation as actual restoration works started in December 2022. So far, rehabilitation works at the Station have cost the Company ten billion Malawi Kwacha.
This development is good news for the Chakwera administration as electricity blackouts were infuriating almost everyone. Bravo President Chakwera as Malawians know that it is as a result of your leadership of choosing the best to run EGENCO and the discipline therein unlike during the DPP regime where corruption was the order of the day, corruption which led to uncontrolled black-outs, this time things are different. Once again Bravo!
