WHEN you are grappling with a daunting problem, sometimes it is important to check on how your neighbours could be performing in solving that problem.
It is for that reason that while tackling the problem of power deficit in the country I decided to focus on a bigger perspective – the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and beyond.
According to an Africa Infrastructure report, the total installed generation capacity of Africa’s 48 Sub-Saharan African countries is just 68 gigawatts, sorry to say not more than Spain’s!
To compound the situation, as much as one-quarter of that capacity is unavailable because of obsolete plants and poor maintenance.
On average that means that only one person in every five people has access to electricity in the sub-continent.
Apart from South Africa the per capita consumption of electricity in SSA averages only 124 kilowatt-hours a year and is declining so fast.
Ironically, the rate of consumption is barely one per cent of that in
high-income countries.
This means that even if all was to be allocated to household lighting, it would hardly be enough to power one light bulb per person for six hours a day.
More than 30 African countries are now experiencing power shortages and regular interruptions in service, leading to many hours of load-shedding.
For South Africa, which is the economic powerhouse of the region, frequent load-shedding has rippled across the rainy ball nation since
November last year.
News24 reports that across the world, countries are dealing with an average of 5.5 power outages a month.
A more regional look reveals that high income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries – which include Australia, much of Europe, Canada, the United States (US) and the UK – hardly suffer at all, with less than one outage a month, lasting less than half an hour.
Even high income countries outside the OECD only suffer from 1.3 outages a month, for up to an hour.
But beyond these rich countries, the performance decreases.
The biggest victims are countries in the Middle East and North Africa, which according to the World Bank are hit with an average of 23.5 power outages a month.
That’s a power cut of six days a week – lasting an average of 9.4 hours.
Beyond these areas, South Asia is the next worst off – where countries are hit with an average of 17 power outages a month lasting for over an hour.
By comparison SSA is not very much affected, although the effect is more than the average 5.5-outage-a-month.
It undergoes an average of 7.8 power outages a month,for around five hours each time.
South Africa has the ability to generate more power at an affordable level than the rest of the region.
The region overall delivers a fraction of the world’s electricity production – and that’s before load-shedding is factored in.
A separate report from the World Bank on power tariffs in 2011, found that the whole sub-Saharan region of 48 countries – with a population
of 800 million – generated about the same amount of power as Spain – which had a population of 45 million.
The World Bank’s 2011 report also looked at the efficiency of power supplies within SSA, scoring each country from 0 (worst) to 1.0 (best).
The average score across the region for efficiency was 0.82.
The countries which achieved the 1.0 target of efficiency were: Cameroon, Chad, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda,
Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi and the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Democratic of Congo.
Namibia, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Tanzania scored above the average but below 1.0.
Benin, Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe failed to hit the average mark.
As the result of the current electricity situation in SSA the World Bank has projected that Gross domestic product growth rate in the region will average 4.2 per cent in 2015.
In its June 2015 Global Economic Prospects report, the bank revised downwards the projected growth rate to 0.4 per cent.
The performance of the energy sectors is one of the main reasons for that.
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