Mozambique: Northern Cabo Delgado Remains Plunged Into Darkness

Maputo — Sabotage by the islamist terrorists operating in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, has deprived much of the province of electrical power, reports Wednesday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”, and the publicly owned electricity company, EDM, admits that it does not know when it will be able to restore the power supply.

The sabotage took place in September, and cut the power supplies to Muidumbe, Mueda, Nangade, Palma and Mocimboa da Praia districts. About 25,000 EDM clients remain without electricity.

“These districts are without power because our lines are down, and we probably have problems at the Auasse sub-station too”, said Gildo Marques, the EDM service director for Cabo Delgado.

Due to the lack of security in the northern districts of the province, EDM technical teams are not going into the bush to investigate the state of the power lines, and so the company does not know what has happened since September.

“It’s possible that some pylons have been knocked down, that there are tree branches on the lines, and that the transformer posts and other equipment have been vandalised”, said Marques. “But we can only reconnect the power after security has been established”.

The power cuts cause EDM enormous losses. It cannot issue clients in the affected districts with bills for power they are not receiving, and it will eventually have to spend an unknown amount on repairing the damage.

“In the five districts which now have no electricity, we used to invoice 22 million meticais (about 386,000 US dollars, at current exchange rates) a month”, said Marques. “Up to June 2019, when the last assessment was made, it was calculated that the attacks had caused us losses of around four million dollars”.

The terrorist raids have also forced EDM to stop its rural electrification expansion programmes in northern Cabo Delgado.

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