By Makutu Manneh
Gallo Saidy, managing director of the National Water and Electricity Company, said keeping Karpower in The Gambia would have left the country in a worse electricity situation and placed even greater pressure on NAWEC’s finances.
Speaking on Kerr Fatou on Thursday, Saidy said NAWEC would not have been able to restore its own generators or invest in expanding its generation capacity if it had continued relying on Karpower.
“The comfort and the services we are providing to the Gambian people today, we wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said. “Our debt portfolio would have been over the ceiling. We would have been bankrupt. NAWEC was bankrupt.”
Saidy said NAWEC’s return to profitability in 2025, its first profit in years, was the result of deliberate decisions that he said had strengthened the company, even if those efforts were not always recognized by the public.
He said Karpower had an installed capacity of 30 megawatts but could supply only about 25 megawatts to the grid. NAWEC, he added, is now generating about 30 megawatts from its own plants.
Saidy said the company is also responding to longstanding calls for NAWEC to take greater responsibility for electricity generation rather than depend heavily on outside producers.
“If Karpower’s presence had been very beneficial to the country, we would have kept it,” he said.
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