By Fatou Touray
Gambians are once again grappling with power outages, and this time NAWEC is pointing to a surge in demand rather than the regional supply shortfall it cited two months ago. But the timing has raised an uncomfortable question that the utility has yet to address directly: does the return of the outages coincide with the expiry of the 50-day emergency power arrangement it signed off on in June?
In late June, a leaked document revealed that the National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC) was seeking approval to purchase emergency power from Senegal. Several outlets, including this publication, reported on the leak, prompting NAWEC to issue a public statement on 24th June clarifying the terms of the arrangement.
In that statement, NAWEC said the deal was a “temporary contingency response” to supply challenges stemming from reduced regional power availability and was designed to protect households and businesses “during this period of uncertainty in the regional energy system.” The arrangement gave NAWEC access to up to 70 MW of additional capacity during peak hours, drawn from an extra turbine running on light fuel oil (LFO)/diesel, to be dispatched only when needed to stabilize supply at peak times.
Crucially, NAWEC was explicit about the arrangement’s shelf life. The utility described it as “temporary, conditional, and flexible,” structured for a maximum of up to 50 days, while noting that supply conditions could stabilize sooner depending on regional generation and fuel availability. The measure, NAWEC said, would be scaled down or discontinued once normal supply conditions returned.
That 24th June statement lands almost exactly 50 days before 15th August—the date NAWEC issued its latest statement acknowledging renewed disruptions. This time, the utility gave a different explanation: an unforeseen surge in nationwide electricity demand, reaching as high as 140 MW during peak hours, which it attributed mainly to prevailing high temperatures.
According to NAWEC, nationwide electricity demand has climbed to about 140 megawatts during peak hours, a surge the utility attributed largely to the prevailing high temperatures. The increase in demand has coincided with constraints on electricity imports, even as NAWEC continues to operate four local generating units.
The utility said the supply situation was further strained by a technical fault affecting one of the major generating units on the import side. To maintain the stability of the available power system, NAWEC said it would implement load shedding during peak hours, primarily between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., affecting several parts of the country.
Nowhere in the 15th August statement does NAWEC mention the emergency arrangement from June, whether it was extended, renewed, or simply allowed to lapse on schedule. That silence is precisely what has fueled public suspicion: the 50-day window promised in June expired at almost the exact moment the outages resumed.
It is possible the two events are unrelated — a genuine coincidence of a demand surge driven by heat, coinciding with regional import troubles, arriving just as a separate emergency contract wound down. But it is equally possible that the “temporary, conditional” 70MW of extra capacity Gambians were told about in June was the very buffer keeping the lights on through the summer, and that its quiet expiry is now being repackaged as a fresh, unrelated crisis.
Only NAWEC can settle which it is. The utility has a track record this year of citing different causes for successive rounds of outages — maintenance and equipment rehabilitation in early June, technical faults in distribution in May, and now a demand surge in August — without consistently linking these explanations back to the emergency import arrangement it announced with such specificity in June.
For a public that has endured months of load-shedding, rosters, and shifting explanations, a straight answer to a straightforward question would help: was the 50-day emergency supply extended, and if not, is its expiry connected to the outages now affecting the country? NAWEC owes its customers that clarity.
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