Brownouts Hit State-Supplied Power Consumers in Hargeisa

On 5 April 2014, Somaliland Sun reported that hundreds of households in Hargeisa were without power after the Hargeisa Electricity Agency (HEA) ceased supply. The article, by-lined Yusuf M Hasan and datelined Hargeisa, said the brown-outs affected not only households but also government offices, hospitals and schools that rely on HEA supply, and that the outage was in its third full day at the time of writing.

According to the same report, sporadic power cuts began about a week earlier, lasting hours at a time, before turning into a full brown-out on Thursday. The HEA managing director, as reported by Somaliland Sun, said the initial outages were caused by the malfunction of two out of the three generators at the state city power supplier, and that services failed completely after the third generator went out of commission. The article did not explain the cause of the simultaneous failure of all three generators.

Somaliland Sun also reported that from Friday the Hargeisa Group Hospital, described as the country's major public health facility, reverted to its own generator due to lack of supply from HEA, and that a number of services were temporarily withdrawn due to irregular power supply, among them laboratories and theatre. The report said some patients were taken away by relatives without doctors' discharge.

The article noted that the HEA managing director, identified in one passage as Ahmed Yasin Aw Mohamed Jama and in another as Ahmedyassin Aw Mohamed, was the first state body head appointed after public advertisement, a departure from the norm of presidential or ministerial appointment. Somaliland Sun said the appointment was made by the Civil Service Commission, though the article's accounts of the appointment process are not fully reconciled. The report also said the managing director had been in office over a year, and that before he took office the HEA was engulfed in a corruption controversy with its parent body, the Ministry of Public Works and Housing. President Ahmed Mahmud Silanyo, it said, established a high-level ministerial committee charged with streamlining the agency.

Somaliland Sun further reported that HEA was making a profit and was government subsidized, and that consumers were transferring their demand to private city power suppliers charging double the HEA fees but described as more reliable. The article did not provide tariff figures, subsidy amounts, or the number of affected households beyond the word "hundreds".

The Somaliland Sun report does not establish what has happened to the outage, HEA supply, the hospital's power situation, or the generator repairs after 5 April 2014.