ZAMBIANS NOT GULLIBLE, THEY KNOW LOAD-SHEDDING IS DUE TO POWER EXPORTS – MUNDUBILE
MPOROKOSO PF MP Brian Mundubile says it is surprising that Vice-President Mutale Nalumango thinks citizens are so gullible that they believe the load shedding being experienced is due to the drought that the country experienced two years ago.
On Saturday, Vice-President Nalumango said that while politicians may try to politicise the energy crisis, citizens understand that the long hours of load shedding are due to the severe drought the country had faced.
However, in an interview Saturday, Mundubile said Zambians are well informed and understand that the current load shedding is due to power exports.
“That clearly shows that her honour the Vice-President and her political party, her government, is disconnected from the Zambian people. It also shows that government has no regard for the Zambian people. I say that because the Zambian people speak; they speak not only through politicians but also directly, they speak on radio programmes, they speak on TV programmes, and it’s therefore surprising that her honour the Vice-President thinks Zambians are so gullible as to believe that up to now the issue of load shedding is on account of the drought that was there two years ago,” Mundubile noted.
“Zambians know that we are exporting power; Zambians know that we’ve been exporting power. It’s just two days ago that Zesco decided to stop exporting up to 400 megawatts of power, and we are seeing some improvement in power supply in certain areas. It’s unfortunate that her honour the Vice-President thinks Zambians are not well informed. It’s not about politics; it’s about reality. When she was meeting some officials from Namibia, the officials from Namibia were actually acknowledging that whilst we have load shedding here, they were receiving power from Zambia. Zambians were watching; that was on live television. How does she expect them not to know that the biggest reason why we have load shedding is because we are exporting power?”
Mundubile explained that despite the drought that the country experienced, citizens would not be subjected to this extent of load shedding if government had minimized exports.
“The drought that we had was not the first drought, and the meteorological department under the Ministry of Environment is able to predict future droughts. That particular drought, we had a ministerial statement on the floor of the House from the Ministry of Environment to tell us that they were expecting a drought in some parts of the country. Even with that information, government was still exporting power. If you go back to our debates at the beginning of 2023, before the drought, we started warning government against exporting power, so what you need to understand is that this problem started before the drought, yet government knew that there would be a drought,” he stated.
“They started exporting power, reducing the water levels before the drought, and we warned them: look, you need to minimize your exports so that we have enough water to generate power in difficult times. So, whereas the drought did have some impact on water levels, the irresponsible act—the reckless export of power—started even before the drought, and we warned them that there was a need to keep the water levels at a certain level by minimizing generation in good time. Generating [of] power at maximum comes with reducing the water levels, so when the drought came, it worsened the situation. This whole load shedding, the whole blame, is on the UPND and their appetite to export power before and after the drought. Had they not exported power before the drought, the drought would have come when we still had comfortable levels in Kariba. Even just with one rainy season, we would have gone back to normal.”
He added that citizens are expected to see an improvement in power supply because government had reduced power exports.
“The simple example is, we share Kariba Dam with Zimbabwe. Is the load shedding in Zimbabwe as bad as it is here? They are doing much better; they had some load shedding, they didn’t go through what we are going through, why? Because the Zambezi River Authority allocates water to both countries, so for them, they still had some good volume of water to continue generating power when we had depleted ours; we had depleted ours because of exports.
So the elephant in the room there is export of power. You’ll see some improvement now because they’ve stopped exporting 400 megawatts. Forget about the drought, that’s an excuse. Had government been responsible, we would not have been in this position even with the drought,” said Mundubile.
News Diggers
Indeed, we are not gullible. We know who borrowed Eurobond in our name. And defaulted not once, but TWICE on repayment. We also know who withdrew eleven mirrion US dollars cash from the Zambian treasury account from a bank in Turkey. We also know that that cash was transported in the presidential jet back to Zambia. With the full knowledge and consent / authority of the then Head of State. Mr “Bonanza,” currently servibg sentence was seen in a video mocking the current head of State by imitating his traditional dance.
Yes, there is loads shedding. And it is being addressed appropriately. No matter how many hours of loadshedding, we can never go back to a bunch of shameless criminals.
NEVER.
EVER.
Never ever indeed!
It’s not true that the major cause of loadsheding is power exports.The major cause of loadsheding is successive governments failure to invest in power generation infrastructure and slowness at power sector reforms.Zambia has seen major industrial developments whose power demand has outstretched supply..Past governments did not think about diversified electricity sources like solar and biofuels and even wind.Mundubile is just passing wind
This man has no shame. PF failed to settle a bill for import of electricity from Mozambique. These are the financially indisciplined misleaders who will never be entrusted with leadership in Zambia.
And today he thinks we don’t know that some of the contracts for export of electricity were contracted during PF era. The amount of power being exported has been reduced by about 80%. But we still have to import to meet the demand at peak hours.
People like Mundubila are just trying to take chances.These chaps left the country bankrupt.They are here today fighting for their own survival cause their businesses existed through government contracts which are cut.They have been benefiting from government.HH is cleaning their nonsense left behind