CS Chirchir: No one will held responsible for August blackout

By Peter Ochieng

Energy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Davis Chirchir on Friday ruled out the possibility of anyone being held responsible for the August nationwide blackout, which affected key government installations, among them the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

Kenya Power Company in a statement said that the Friday, 25th August, 2023 night blackout was caused by system disturbance.

"We have experienced a general system disturbance thereby causing a major outage. Our technical teams are troubleshooting with the aim of restoring supply at the earliest. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused. Thank you for the continued partnership,” Kenya Power said.

Some Kenyans held the opinion that someone or people should be held culpable for the blackout.

However, CS Chirchir says it is not possible to apportion culpability to any individual of a firm.

He spoke while appearing before the National Assembly Committee on Energy.

"When they occur, their severity and the status of system resilience influence how the system recovers. These conditions make the system vulnerable to system disturbances," he said.

The CS’s response did not go down well with Mwala Member of Parliament (MP) Vincent Kawaya, who doubles up as the committee’s chairperson.

He said the ministry cannot say no individual or entity is culpable when it has identified those responsible for the outage.

"We need to establish the root cause of the outage. If we try to protect any entity, this kind of outage may occur again," he warned.

Following the outage, the CS for roads and transport Kipchumba Murkomen made leadership changes at the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA).

He announced the dismissal of Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) Managing Director Alex Gitari and General Manager Project and Engineering Services, Fred Odawo.

Henry Ogoye replaced Gitari while Engineer Samuel Mwochache succeeded Odawo.

The outage affected operations at JKIA for some hours, after some of the generators at the airport failed to start.