RBZ Funds Covered ZESA's Power Imports Until October 2018
The Zimbabwe Electricity and Supply Authority (ZESA) said that it has not received foreign currency from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) since October 2018.
As a result of foreign currency constraints, the power utility has not been able to import power from neighbouring countries.
This was revealed by ZESA acting chief executive officer, Patrick Chivaura while addressing a Business Breakfast Meeting on Monday. He said:
Let me say this, it must be understood by everyone, we have had no load shedding in the past four or five years. I think every one of us is acquainted with that.
What has been the reason for that to happen that way? We have always had a deficit of internal generation in the country, we have always had it.
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But, we were covered very well, I must say, by the Reserve Bank all those four or five years until October last year.
We were not able to meet our forex obligation. To make the face of electricity or power (situation) worse, we also have to endure with the loss of water in Kariba and that has changed the face of our production in power.
Last year, we saw the commissioning of the Kariba South Power Station which added 300MW to our grid and we saw a reduction in imports last year and sometimes we did not even import anything from Eskom because of that change.
There was water last year and we could generate as much as 1050MW, but today the amount of water that we are able to use to generate power has been reduced to the extent that we can only do 358MW of generation at Kariba where capacity is 1050MW. You can call that an act of God or drought.
