The grid across Kenya isn’t perfect; outages happen, transformers fail, lines snap and sub-stations trip.
This past week, Kenyans, with their phones fully charged, going about their business watched in disbelief as the country’s leader — William Ruto — stood in Doha and declared that Kenya is now officially doing load-shedding between 5pm and 10pm, that our power generation isn’t enough and that we need Sh1.2 trillion to hit a goal of 10,000 MW.
If you sat in your house, watching electricity flow uninterrupted, you’d feel the disconnect. Because the version of the crisis the president is selling doesn’t align with the lived reality of tens of thousands of households. Our problem, if anything, is less about generation—and far more about distribution, rotting infrastructure, mis-governance, and political theatre. But the language of crisis sells. And that matters.
The grid across Kenya isn’t perfect. Sure, outages happen. A transformer fails. A line snaps. A sub-station trips. These happen. But they are local and episodic, not the blanket nightly rationing of whole regions implied by Ruto’s confession. While the Ministry of Energy, through Kenya Power and the regulator note that load-shedding may be in effect, analysts point to something deeper: a worn-out network that leaks 23-25 per cent of what’s generated before it reaches the household. And imports of power have ballooned—not because we couldn’t generate at all, but because we couldn’t reliably deliver what was generated.
So what if you’re reading this in Embu or Kisumu and the lights were fine? Great. But ask yourself: why the crisis narrative at all? When we already have major renewable-generation capacity (geothermal, wind, hydro), why is the diagnosis “dramatic generation shortfall” rather than “decaying wires, management rot and a plan for steady increase in production”? Why tell the country we must spend trillions on new power plants when the existing infrastructure isn’t fit for purpose, and no one seems to want to fix it?
Distribution losses
This is a script as old as Kenyan public-policy theatre: starve the public entity, let its performance slip, declare crisis, then hand off the “solution” to private interests. It isn’t hypothetical. Under the Ruto regime, there has been a steady drumbeat of announcements about selling off state-owned companies. The energy sector is no exception.
You’ve got talk of private investment in off-grid systems, nuclear plants, pipeline companies, and even the listing via IPO of entities like the Kenya Pipeline Company. All of this sits alongside the official narrative of inadequate generation. The convenient pairing: we don’t have enough power so we must bring in private capital which will own more of the grid. Meanwhile the public waits.
And that’s the point. Not only do we get the promise of “more power” if we pay more; we also get the transfer of control, the creation of new contracts, and new profit centres for cronies. Meanwhile the underlying weaknesses remain—distribution losses, transformer failures, grid overloads at peak hours—while we are told the problem is “generation”.
KenGen reports that Kenya’s installed capacity hovers at around 3,300 MW, yet peak demand recently breached around 2,392 MW in August. You’d think that means we should have some margin. But the margin is illusion. Because the network cannot dispatch the full 3,300 MW reliably; some plants sit idle, some wind and solar output is curtailed because the grid cannot evacuate. And yet the official narrative goes: we’re short. We’re rationing. We must invest more billions we don’t even have.
In short, the crisis is manufactured—either through neglect of the distribution network, freezing of new power purchase agreements (PPAs) that leave generation project pipelines stalled, or allowing IPPs (independent power producers) to dominate with expensive terms. It’s very convenient that when the system “can’t deliver”, the fix offered is a significantly more expensive, private-owned one.
Accountable leadership
Meanwhile, every few weeks you flip the switch and nothing happens. No telegrams from the government. No national emergency. Just the same old sound of power humming through the wires, in thousands of homes, like in that house outside Nairobi. And you think: if that’s the case, then why the loud announcement? Why the global speech about rationing, the 10,000 MW ambitions, trillion-shilling budgets? Because the crisis isn’t for us—it’s for the deal-makers.
It doesn’t stop at power. The same pattern plays out in telecoms, in transport, infrastructure. The public is told: wait for the next solution, pay for the next fix, bear the cost of delay. And at the end, the result is the transfer of a public asset into private hands. And we’re left with higher tariffs, less transparency and less control.
We already know the fatigue. The young father who can’t study by night because the transformer tripped. The teenager who gives up on the online class because WiFi died. The small business owner who resorts to a noisy generator because the grid connection is unreliable. The young professional who wonders if the promise of “industrialising Kenya” was ever really meant for him—or for someone else’s boardroom.
So ask yourself: when the President announces nationwide power rationing, who is the address-book intended for? Who sits in the room writing the terms of the “investment” that will fix it? And who will pay, once again? Because as power cables creak and contracts shift hands, we—the consumers, the taxpayers—are getting the raw end.
Kenya does not need a bold new generation narrative. It needs honest management, wiring that works, accountable leadership, transparent procurement, standardised power purchase costs, and a regulator that defends the public interest—not private profit.
Ngunyi is an active citizen and a business owner of a tech startup working in the marketing automation space.
