Online Reporter
THE main function of Zesa is to supply enough electricity to a wide range of users, from giant factories, mines and referral hospitals down to ordinary people using a few units a month in a modest home.
The second requirement is to do this as efficiently as possible to keep tariffs as low as possible for all consumers and to make sure that a fast-growing economy is not retarded in that growth by a shortage of electricity.
This requires good forecasting and planning, especially as rapid industrialisation will increase the load faster than many might expect.
Zesa was created soon after independence when six power utilities were amalgamated into a single concern.
There was the old Electricity Supply Authority which owned one small thermal station and handled distribution to consumers outside the four main cities.
These four cities each had their own distribution network with Harare and Bulawayo also having their own small and inadequate power stations. There was also Capco, which owned Kariba South, the main power station at that time and which co-ordinated the generation of all power stations.
It was an administrative nightmare that only worked because the small management team at each utility were usually personal friends with each other, such was the small size of the then pool of engineers.
During the wave of commercialisation of parastatals in the late 1990s, Zesa was reorganised between 1997 and 2006 into a holding company under State ownership with four subsidiary companies doing the actual work.
These were Zimbabwe Power Company, Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company, Zesa Enterprises, an investment company, and Powertel Communications.
The head office did the co-ordination between the four companies, so there were five sets of managers and administrators.
The rational behind the split was largely to allow the distribution company to buy power independently from anyone, although this could be done and was being done without any bother by the single authority.
It was also thought that each company could concentrate on its core business, despite the fact that they were intimately connected and ultimately reliant on the same stream of revenue, from those who bought electricity.
Within a few years it was seen that this unbundling was an error, simply creating an extra level of management and systems so the five sets of managers spoke to each other.
When the Second Republic took office, President Mnangagwa backed efforts to recreate a single entity. There was some resistance, partly because one result would be to cut back the large managerial staff, and while there was talk, little was done.
This changed when Zesa was placed, alongside a lot of other State-owned companies, under the Mutapa Investment Fund which was given the Presidential-backed remit of fixing-up all these enterprises.
Cabinet had already approved the eventual rebundling of Zesa so the main job of Mutapa was, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Energy and Power Development, to work out the best legal and staff structure.
That has now been done.
This is good modern management, which wants to see the overwhelming bulk of those employed in any organisation to be the ones creating the value, rather than administrating these value creators.
It has been announced that under the new unified structure, there will be abolition of posts through retirement and redundancy.
We would predict that those in pure engineering and technical posts will not be affected, but the consolidation of the management and administration will empty quite a few floors of offices.
The administrative and legal amalgamation of the generation and transmission entities will also make planning a lot simpler, being done by a single unit rather than three.
This should make the necessary simultaneous expansion of generation, both by Zesa and independent power producers, the national grid and the distribution networks.
Besides planning, maintenance and fault repairs should be simpler. Consumers with a fault do not care if the fault is a turbine blade at a power station or the cable from their local substation, or anything in between.
They just want it fixed, fast.
Switching, in management language, from a horizontally-organised set of interdependent entities to a vertically-integrated organisation under a single command structure should boost efficiency, smooth out past and present conflicts over investment priorities and create a far leaner and effective management.
