Feature


By Frazer Potani,Lilongwe, Malawi


The time was 11:15 a.m. on a Monday and in a mansion in Area 47 Township in Lilongwe City , a house girl fills a pot with some water before gently placing it on a live electric cooker ready to prepare nsima for lunch for her working class employers and their three school-going children at mid day.


Suddenly, however, power goes off forcing the maid quickly rushing to a nearby local market to buy some charcoal for energy to still prepare the lunch in the absence of electricity.


Electricity blackouts-a common experience and part of Malawian life are due to the country’s sole state controlled electricity supplier, Escom’s failure to meet Malawi ’s energy demand.


President Bingu wa Mutharika admits that increasing electricity generation to meet the country’s energy demand remains one of his government’s challenges.


Mutharika says low electricity generation in Malawi even threatens the country’s social-economic development as the private sector popularly referred to as Malawi ’s engine of the economy, depends on electricity to produce.


“We need energy for the private sector to produce to export,” says Mutharika.


Concerned by rampant electricity blackouts Packaging Industries Malawi (PIM) Ltd Managing Director Symon Itaye has repeatedly pleaded with government to rescue Escom from low electricity generation hiccups saying the electricity cuts were hindering private sector production and forcing the sector incurring unnecessary losses.


The global energy arm, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says low energy supplies remain a universal problem and is one of the contributions to under-development including worsening of poverty in poor developing countries such as Malawi .


The agency says almost one-third of the world’s population has no electricity and perhaps the greatest challenge for the rest of the century is developing the power desperately needed for poor people without electricity in societies like Malawi without at the same time, making the green house effect worse.


“Across the globe, more than 2 billion people have no access to modern forms of energy and are cooking on wood, dung, and charcoal. Women and children often have to spend each day collecting heating fuel, further destroying tree cover,” says the agency adding that using wood and other related products as energy sources is also hazardous to health.


“Indoor air pollution due to smoke from cooking fires causes 1.8 million deaths a year, mostly in rural areas,” says the agency.


It adds that the problem for the half of world’s population that lives on less than $2 a day is how to afford the electricity they desperately need for basics such as cooking and heating, agriculture, lighting for education, pumps for clean water and work shops for policy makers to draw out vital programmes for advancing societies’ development agenda.


The World Energy Council (WEC) says the number of people without electricity has increased in the past 20 years worldwide and will continue to grow by 25 percent in the next 20 years on current trends.


“In Africa 1 in five people have no electricity, oil rich Nigeria has half of her population [70 million] people without power, India has 400 million, and Brazil 30 million,” says the council.


The council says appreciating that energy is a token for social-economic development for the global community, delegates from eight world’s richest countries (G8) agreed in 1999 to give 1 billion people access to electricity worldwide.


“This plan has since been abandoned, however, due to lack of enthusiasm from the United States ,” says the council adding, “So how does the world break the vicious circle of poverty and at the same time avoid burning yet more fossil fuels?”


The National Statistical Office (NSO) says just about 10 per 100 households in Malawi ’s 13 million plus population, are accessible to electricity.


Recently during the launch of the 2009/2010 National Forestry Season (NFS) in Chiradzuru, Mutharika complained that low access to electricity in Malawi is contributing to wanton cutting down of the already few remaining trees for firewood and charcoal processing for energy and these are also increasing deforestation and environmental degradation.


“As a result, Malawi is also experiencing climate change,” he says adding that this has also affected the country’s rainfall timetable.


“Long time ago we were able to predict that our first rains would fall around late November, for example say on November 25 and it used to happen. This is no longer the case today,” says Mutharika.


He says to boost electricity generation in order to save trees government will implement electricity generation projects targeting specific supply to particular areas away from the national grid.


The president therefore, urged Malawians to plant trees on deforested areas.


“After planting the tress take care for them and I promise that I will give a reward a community that will plant and care for more trees than others,” says Mutharika.


The 14-member Southern Africa Development Corporation (SADC) says about 80 percent of the region’s population rely on biomass (mainly wood and other related products) due to its struggle to generate electricity demanded by its population and this is fueling poverty and deforestation.


The corporation discloses that the region has a total estimated forest area of 262, 818, 000 hectares (or 29 percent of its total land area) and its tree cover is declining by day due to deforestation.


“Annual rates of deforestation in the member states range from 0.75 to 2.2 percent with Angola and Malawi having the lowest and highest rates of deforestation respectively,” says the corporation.


The regional grouping adds that this degradation is contributing to pervasive poverty mainly within rural communities, who in turn depend so much on the environment for their livelihoods.


Natural Resources, Energy and Environment Deputy Minister Ephraim Chiume admits that Malawi has over the last few decades experienced a number of adverse climatic hazards due to among others things, land use, land-use change and forestry.


“The most serious hazards have been dry spells, seasonal droughts, intense rainfall, river line floods, flush floods and unpredictable rainfall patterns,” says Chiume.


He adds that these hazards have adversely impacted on Malawi ’s food and water security, water quality and quantity, energy and sustainable livelihoods of rural communities.


“Conserving our forests and managing them in a sustainable manner therefore, is one way of making Malawi better adapt to these adverse effects and mitigate climate change,” says Chiume adding that government has earmarked 65 million tree seedlings for planting during the 2009/2010 NFS.


According to the Forestry Department, Malawi is losing 160 million trees against 60 million planted per year (or losing 100 million trees per year).


This is why the country urgently needs boosting electricity generation to encourage Malawians switch to electricity use from sticking to cutting down trees for firewood, charcoal or Malawians would one day wake up from their beds and mats only to realize their country has turned into a desert.