From Tororo without love: What Somalia can teach ‘bad’ Umeme

Somalia has hundreds of small power operators. You can shout over the fence to your neighbour who is supplying the street, if the power goes off. He can’t ignore you.

I suspect if one did an opinion poll to find the most hated public services/utilities body in Uganda today, it would be the electricity company Umeme. Don’t be surprised if Umeme, which came to be after the lethargic state-owned Uganda Electricity Board (UEB) was privatised, is even more hated than its successor.

In the last year, calls have grown louder for Umeme to be nationalised and to returning the management of electricity to state-appointed bureaucrats. That would be a disaster.

While Umeme is almost as inefficient, and probably has worse customer service than UEB used to, the problem is not privatisation. Rather privatisation was done badly. We merely replaced a state monopoly with a private one.

I have argued in this column before that UEB should have been privatised into regional electricity distribution companies. Something like Umeme Central, Umeme East, Umeme North, Umeme West. They would be independent companies.

The grid would be organised in such a way that although you are in eastern Uganda, and therefore buying power from Umeme East, you could change and get it from Umeme Central if it had cheaper prices and better service. This could be achieved partly by the use of prepaid metre cards, much like we use for DSTv. You buy the bouquet that works best for you. That would introduce competition.

Umeme is hopeless, because it has no competition.
My experience in Tororo and Mbale last week convinced me. I needed to do some heavy-duty work on the Internet and went to Tororo. There was no power. I waited for hours. The few places that had generators and Internet were not helpful because the power fluctuations were horrible. I decided to drive on that horrible road to Mbale to try my luck. The place also didn’t have power.

Eventually, I found a smart café that had stabilised its generator, and had a decent Internet service.
Part of the problem is that I had run out of laptop battery, and couldn’t do some of the work from home in the village.

It is all because we swallowed Umeme’s Kool Aid and believed that this “rural electrification” thing would work. Electricity was extended to the Apokor-Maliri area of Tororo County a few years ago.
Until that time, we had relied on solar power. We were in control, and ensured that all the houses in the compound were powered, and the outside areas were lit.

We had figured out how to move to the next stage; solar-powered fridges, flat irons (actually we already had that); and solar-powered TVs when the rural electrification/Umeme people arrived. Some of them were friends, and they convinced us to get on the grid.

We did. I was the last to rewire for Umeme; because I remained distrustful. As a result, we stopped further development of our solar power plans. Now I regret it. The Apokor-Maliri area has not had power for over a month since a storm brought lines down. Electricity poles are leaning perilously along the road. Not too far from home, the transformer is sagging, and about to crash.

Over the month, over 100 visits and calls have been made to Umeme in Tororo, and nothing has been done. Owners of small flour mills, a welding workshop and so forth are in tears. The people claim that a trading town on the Tororo-Mbale Road got its supply back after it collected money and greased rogue Umeme employees.

My sense is that whether Apokor-Maliri have power or not, Umeme doesn’t lose or notice. The revenue Umeme gets from the area is probably 0.00000001 per cent of its national collection. However, if there were an Umeme East, that would be 0.001 per cent. Still tiny, but noticeable under a microscope.

The people there wouldn’t have to call 100 times for a month. When I was in the Somali capital Mogadishu early this year, I was struck that electricity supply and street lighting in parts of the city was quite stable. Certainly, there are fewer power outages in Mogadishu than in places like Mbale and Tororo.
This is partly because Somalia doesn’t, and never had, a national electricity monopoly. It has hundreds of small power operators. You can shout over the fence to your neighbour who is supplying the street, if the power goes off. He can’t ignore you.

We should borrow from the Somalis and refine the model. The Uganda People’s Defence Forces who have been in Somalia as the lead contingent of the African Union peacekeeping force can help Umeme get its head around this more democratic approach. So, let us not give Umeme back to the government. We need to break it up to fix it.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com & twitter@cobbo3