By Seedy Jobe
The National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC) said this week that the country’s electricity supply remains stable overall, even as customers in some areas continue to experience brief blackouts heading into the peak of the rainy season.
Buba Badjie, the utility’s public relations officer, addressed the issue in an interview on QTV, acknowledging public frustration over outages while defending the company’s handling of rising demand.
“Electricity is a basic necessity. And it’s not a privilege; it is a right. It’s fundamental for every human being to have it,” Mr. Badjie said.
He said the company was aware of the hardships outages cause customers, particularly at night during the rainy season, but maintained that the broader supply situation remained sound. Occasional faults do occur, he said, but they are typically resolved quickly.
According to Mr. Badjie, the disruptions are not uniform across the country. NAWEC operates roughly 29 power feeders, four of which are classified as critical because of their size and the dense populations they serve. He pointed to the Tranquil feeder, which supplies Brusubi, Bijilo, Tranquil, Jabang and areas extending into Salagi, as an example of how the utility manages that pressure—rotating power among substations and transformers under a single feeder rather than energizing everything simultaneously. That approach, he said, reflects a management strategy rather than a capacity shortage.
Mr. Badjie also pushed back on the idea that the company’s rural electrification efforts were contributing to current load-shedding, calling the connection “absolutely nothing” to do with the outages. Most of the expansion, he said, has occurred in rural areas that collectively account for only 15 to 20 megawatts of demand, while the Greater Banjul Area—where expansion is nearly complete—remains the primary center of consumption.
Still, he acknowledged that overall demand is rising. National peak consumption, once around 110 megawatts, is now approaching 115 to 120 megawatts, he said, prompting NAWEC to increase production during peak hours and put additional measures in place to keep pace.
The rainy season brings its own risks, Mr. Badjie said, chief among them vegetation growth and lightning strikes. In anticipation, NAWEC conducted vegetation control work between April and June, including trimming trees along power lines. “Lightning,” he said, remains outside the company’s control, though protective sensors installed on its equipment are designed to automatically shut down systems during storms to prevent damage.
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