Aden's Electricity: Official Corruption and Murky Deals

عربي

The coastal capital Southern city of Aden lives in complete darkness all the day. This service crisis has constituted one form of suffering in the city since the 1994 war. However, since the defeat of forces affiliated with the Houthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh who were driven out of the city 7 years ago, the electricity problem has emerged as one of the most controversial issues in the very hot city.

Despite the intervention by the Saudi-led Arab Coalition in the city and the successive governments, the continuous power outage, especially in summer with record levels of high temperature and moisture, became the people's daily concerns. The electricity crisis has wide consequences on the economic and humanitarian levels as well as the medical services, small industries, communications and other sectors for which electricity represents a vital source. The crisis continues not only in Aden but in the neighboring governorates such as Lahj, Al-Dhalea and Abyan.

In this field report, "South24" sought to highlight this thorny issue. Our Aden Office's reporter   met a number of officials in different sectors. Meanwhile, officials in the PM's office have so far ignored answering our questions or commenting on the content of this report.

Despite the declaration about the projects to prepare and make maintenance works to the city's power plants along with the establishment of a new station named after former Yemeni President Hadi, the electricity sector in Aden has not witnessed any real improvement even under the Parity Government which was formed as a result of the Riyadh Agreement in 2019.

The electricity problem is mainly related to the lack of generating capacity and the urgent need to make maintenance for a number of governmental power plants. Moreover, the lack of electricity fuel (mazut and diesel) is a problem which has stuck to the successive administrations. Additionally, there are mutual corruption accusations among the governmental parties.

On March 31st 2021, the KSA announced a new oil derivatives grant with a total value of 422 million $ to operate power plants in a number of governorates, especially Aden. The grant came after the daily power blackout rate in Aden exceeded 19 hours due to the fuel unavailability. Although this grant actually contributed in making some improvements in the electricity service in Aden and some other governorates during past months, many problems accompanied it such as the delay of the grant's batches and shipments for days and weeks which made Aden. Thus, Aden has been mired in the darkness again.  Moreover, the grant was about to stop many times due to the disputes between the Saudi donor and the Yemeni parties, especially the government, the governorates' local authorities and the Electricity Corporation. 

Last September, a committee responsible for facilitating the grant's oil derivatives batches which consists of governmental figures from the two parties blamed both people and local authorities in Aden for the delay of one batch of the grant. According to Saba News Agency, the committee said that people's refusal to pay their bills and not transferring money to the joint financial account along with the random power links are the reasons behind the delay [1].

However, exclusive sources spoke to "South24" about other reasons behind the delay of many shipments of the fuel grants. According to the sources, the relevant governmental agencies and Aden's Public Electricity Corporation were slack in requesting the city’s stations needs although an article of the deal stipulated that fuel supplies orders have to be sent more than one month before the previous batch ran out of fuel. 

According to the sources, this came as part of a plan that aimed at creating shortages in supplying the governmental power plants with their fuel needs. Instead, they tend to buy urgent shipments of commercial fuels with heavy costs under the pretext of covering the deficit.