ZESA BOARD DISSOLVED

Government has dissolved boards for the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa), the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) and the Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC).

This would allow for the establishment of a single board under the Zesa umbrella to manage Zimbabwe’s public energy sector.

According to the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI), the country’s power utility — Zesa Holdings — has been struggling to generate sufficient electricity to meet demand.
This deficiency resulted in a $224m loss in 2016.

In a statement yesterday, Finance and Economic Development minister Patrick Chinamasa said the dissolution of the boards was in line with new parastatal reform regime necessitated by the desire to revive the parasitical, loss-making State enterprises.


“Government has been consistent in emphasising the critical contribution expected from the State Enterprises and Parastatal (SEP) sector towards the revival of Zimbabwe’s economic fortunes and in this regard has for some time been pursuing a programme of SEPs reform designed to enhance performance, improve service-delivery and to bring more order, discipline and rationality to the sector as a whole.

“This includes, promoting good corporate governance in the SEPs sector, undertaking an overall strategic portfolio review, individual SEPs performance reviews and, conducting forensic audits where the need arises in some SEPs,” said Chinamasa.

“The 24th November, 2017 inaugural statement and the more recent State of the Nation Address delivered by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, together with the 2018 National Budget have served to inject additional weight and greater urgency to this programme of reform, and have underlined the need for government to significantly accelerate development of a SEPs short and medium term reform framework that would guide the implementation of the national SEPs reform framework.

“This framework has been developed by the arms of government mandated to oversee SEPs governance, performance and reform, namely the corporate governance unit (CGU) within the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC), the ministry of Finance and Economic Development and the State Enterprises Restructuring Agency (Sera) on the basis of a comprehensive diagnostic analysis of the overall sector.

“In order to facilitate this task and so as to lay a sound, evidence-based foundation on which to conduct the analysis and to develop effective reform strategies, the OPC issued Cabinet circular No. 19 of 2017, which directed line ministries to produce detailed self-assessment and proposed turn-around strategies for all SEPs under their respective purview.

“Line ministries have since responded to this directive, providing relevant data which, in turn, has used to develop a memorandum recommending State enterprises reforms. The memorandum was considered by Cabinet on April 10, 2018,” he said.

The board will be allowed to engage strategic partners under ZPC operations where necessary.
The strategic and Zesa-specific activities of Powertel, said Chinamasa, will be incorporated under ZETDC while excess telecommunication capacity will be included in the merger between State-owned telecommunications units, Zarnet and Africom.

The three firms, Powertel, Zarnet and Africom will be merged. Daily News

Posted in: NEWS