Before you vote: The truth about electricity connections
President Uhuru Kenyatta joins a resident of Kikoneni Mr. Suleiman in lighting-up his newly installed electricity connection by the last mile project in Kwale County. Also present is Kenya Power and Lighting Company Managing Director Ben Chumo and Lunga Lunga Member of Parliament Abdalla Mwashetani. PHOTO | PCSU
“…. in the last four years, we have added more than 2 million homes to the electricity grid. Our streets have been made safer by the street-lighting programme. Our efforts have ensured that 23,000 primary schools across the country have electricity. …60,000 public facilities – just under 70 per cent of the total, most in rural areas – are connected to electricity.
- President Uhuru Kenyatta, Madaraka Day Speech in Nyeri, June 1, 2017
Has Kenya Power added more than two million homes to the electricity grid?
The number of new customers connected under the Rural Electrification Programme more than doubled to 972,018 customers as at July 2016 from 453,544 July 2013, according to the Economic Surveys 2015-2017.
A record 1,278,469 new customers were connected to electricity in the financial year 2015/2016, up from 843,899 new connections the previous fiscal year, according to the Kenya Power and Lighting (KLPC) Annual Report as at end of June 2016 and its five year strategic plan. This means that more than two million users were connected within the two years.
KPLC says the 2015/2016 connections expanded the total connection to 4,890,373 including 7,402 public primary schools metered by the company under the national public schools electrification programme implemented in conjunction with the Rural Electrification Authority (REA). The metered primary schools brought the cumulative connections to 18,793.
Since January this year, the company claims on its website that it made about 570,041 new connections bringing the global connected figure over 6,075,724 connections. This means that 615,310 connections happened between July and December last year.
The KPLC data does not differentiate between commercial/industrial and connections to homes.
LAST MILE CONNECTIVITY
According to the utility company, demand for electricity rose to 1,586 megawatts (MW) in the 2015/2016 fiscal year from 1,468MW in 2013/2014, an increase of eight per cent. The modest increase suggests a slow expansion of commercial/industrial demand.
The speed of customer number growth has seen critics question the accuracy of the connections data. Responding to reports in the media that connection data were fudged, then KLPC managing director Ken Tarus on March 20 said 940,668 customers connected to the national grid have not loaded their meters for months making them “zero vend” customers, which refers to prepaid meters installed but have not yet bought any tokens.
He said most of the customers who are beneficiaries of the World Bank’s GPOBA (Global Partnership of Output Based Aid), and the Last Mile Connectivity programmes were mostly from informal settlements whose monthly consumption is two units on average. “As a result, most of them take long to exhaust the initial pre-loaded units,” said Mr Tarus.
As a result, he said, new customers will now be required to buy their own tokens before accessing power to reduce the number of idle connections.
The figures quoted by President Kenyatta match those of the utility company, but it is not clear the extent to which the controversy has affected the numbers.
