Power outages crippling cement factories work

Cement manufacturers in Tororo District have blamed the decline in cement production on unstable power supply that has been ongoing since the start of this month.

One of the country’s leading producers, Tororo Cement, says it has since recorded about a 50 percent decline in production, which used to stand at  1.2 million tonnes annually, according to the factory officials.

Mr Darmandra Pratap Singh, the manager of Instrumentation at Tororo Cement, said they started experiencing the challenge from January 5 when power transmission was totally cut off for five days.

“They claimed some of the transformers at Tororo main substation had developed technical glitches that required an overhaul but since then, the amount of power has remained insufficient and unstable. We have failed to resume to full capacity production,” he said.

He said power fluctuations have been a challenge that they have been facing as manufacturers for many years but the recent unstable supply has done a lot of damage to their installations and production than never before.

“If this crisis persists, it will likely attract an increase in prices since the demand may overwhelm production,” he said.

The plant manager for Simba Cement in Tororo District, Mr Daniel Wilson, said production of cement has become more expensive as the company opted to use a generator as a subsidy to hydroelectricity power.

“Since the time we started experiencing power cuts, our expenditures on running a generator have tripled. We use more than 100 litres to run the plant mills for hours,” he said.

He appealed to the government to come up with a remedy, saying the company may be forced to reduce its human resource as well.

“We cannot continue paying people who are not working, especially after reducing production capacity,” Mr Wilson said.

Mr Hashim Gitui, a transporter, said he has been in the queue waiting for cement at Tororo Cement factory for four days yet initially he would only take one day before being served.

“Staying here for four days is a total loss on my side because most times we are paid according to the routes we make and it also saves us from abnormal expenditures on accommodation,” he said.

Mr Tom Awuzu, the Umeme Branch manager in Tororo, declined to comment and referred this reporter to the Umeme spokesperson, Mr Peter Kaujju.

Mr Kaujju said the intermittent power supply is as a result of damage of equipment at Tororo power substation

He added that engineers are working hard to repair the equipment in order to restore power.
“We decided to ration power so that everybody has a chance other than loading one area. We loadshed at about 5 megawatts but rotationally,” he said.