By Taban Tom Henry
Financial Constraints has left the Juba power plant in a sorrowful stage.
This was revealed during the inaugural grand launch of South Sudan Chamber of Energy and Minerals (SSCEM) on Thursday.
South Sudan Electricity Corporation is the principal power agency of the government and it is the technical arm of electricity. It was established way back in 2006 and given the mandate and responsibility for developing, managing of the electricity power in generation transmission and distribution system all over the country.
Speaking during the occasion, the Chairperson of the South Sudan electricity Corporation, Beck Awan said that the Juba power station, the Juba power plant is lying in a sorrowful stage due to lack of funds.
He said the engines are rusting as a result they would have to be disposed off shortly as the only logical thing to be done.
“The national resources that were used to buy these machines and install them would have gone to waste. It is not only the Juba power station that is facing these problems of financial shortages, essentially all government owned power stations are facing the same challenge, that is lack of finance and services to operate them,” he said.
Awan disclosed that they have problems in recruitment and retaining of labor forces on how to get qualified and skilled workforce saying most well-trained engineers and technicians have left for greener pastures in other sectors because they see no future in the corporation which is suffering from neglect and lack of funds.
“We do really acknowledge the government past efforts to support the corporation considering many competing projects the government is taking financially yet we are still urging the government to do more for the up keep of the utilities” Bech said.
The Chair of the South Sudan Electricity Corporation stated that South Sudan should learn a lesson from the neighboring countries where utilities are given maximum support.
He stressed that the other challenge facing the South Sudan Electricity Corporation is the duplicity of the roles in the energy sector institutions.
“On many points there is need to separate the roles and responsibilities while these roles in the corporation are clearly defined, other institutions either knowingly or unknowingly are continuing to interfere with the roles of the corporation and creating a lot of lack of understanding and sometimes neglect other things because we don’t know our demarcations.”
Awan appealed to the government to separate the roles among the institutions so that they know who does what.