Harare City Council has renewed its fight to repossess the Harare Thermal Power Station to improve power generation and curb outages in the city.
Harare mayor Muchadeyi Masunda confirmed the city’s renewed efforts to reclaim the property.
“When I visit the high density areas to get a feel of what’s happening on the ground, I don’t enjoy being rudely reminded that the ongoing power outages were unheard of in Zimbabwe pre-1980,” Masunda said this week in Harare.
“The power issue has to be our next Mt Kilimanjaro.
We have enough relatively unencumbered assets to leverage the requisite funding from international financial institutions. We need to go back to the good old days when the city council used to generate power from its own thermal plant in order to meet the needs of all stakeholders. We have established that we would need to install a 500 megawatt facility which will obviously cost a lot of money. We need to take back from Zesa our thermal power station as part of the long term plan of being masters of the city of Harare destiny.”
Harare has been hard hit by power outages that have seen residents going for days without electricity. Residents have blamed power utility Zesa for failure to address the issue.
“We have to take due cognisance of the powerful green revolution lobby in terms of what we may want to install in place of the coal powered thermal facility which we should repossess from Zesa,” Masunda said.
Zesa spokesperson Fullard Gwasira could not comment on the local authority’ latest move yesterday as he was said to be in a meeting.
