Electricity crisis set to worsen as coal mining grinds to a halt

By Lance Guma
13 April 2006

Heavy rains and poor planning by company executives at Wankie Colliery are threatening to worsen the country’s already fragile electricity generation capacity. Insiders at the company have told Newsreel most if not all mining shafts are flooded with water and the equipment to drain water has broken down and the company needs foreign currency to buy spare parts. Worse still, some of that equipment is itself submerged in water. This has meant there is virtually little or no coal mining taking place in the country.

Zimbabwe relies on electricity from the Kariba Hydro-electric plant and the Hwange Thermal Plant which uses coal. The shortfall is made up of imports from neighbouring countries, especially Eskom in South Africa. 40 percent of the power comes from South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. The country is already in the midst of serious electricity load shedding with many areas having to endure endless power cuts. The latest revelations are set to compound the problem. The thermal power plants in the country require coal to generate electricity without this the problem gets worse.

Several downstream industries will also be affected. Iron and steel manufacturer Ziscosteel and others that use either coal or electricity face a bleak future. Wankie Colliery officials are refusing to speak on the matter but Brilliant Pongo a journalist who first broke the story says their heads are on the line and they are aware they were supposed to plan in advance of the rainy season. ‘Right now there is very little or no coal production and for a company that has been operating since 1923, one wonders how they can find themselves in this situation,’ Pongo told Newsreel.

It turns out some of the workers at the colliery have gone for over 50 days without getting paid. The scaling down of operations has had a negative effect on the morale of the Hwange community, which is built exclusively around the coal mining activities of Wankie Colliery.