Leaders across the political divide have piled pressure on President William Ruto to take action against the Ministry of Energy and Kenya Power officials over the nationwide power outage that lasted over 12 hours since Friday at 9 pm.
In a move to call for accountability, Opiyo Wandayi, National Assembly Leader of Minority and Samson Cherargei, Nandi Senator, noted that the outage affected most operations of the country, including economic activities.
Wandayi, who also serves as Ugunja MP, lamented that the blackout was a disservice to Kenyans who are already grappling with expensive electricity costs.
"It is a scandal which requires heads to roll, but more importantly, there is a need to establish what is happening at KPLC, which continues to enjoy a long monopoly but does not give value to taxpayers money," the MP rallied for decisive action.
On his part, Cherargei demanded that the national utility firm compensate Kenyans for the losses incurred during the over 12-hour outage.
The Senator termed the power outage as a shame, given that key infrastructure such as Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) were affected after backup generators failed.
Notably, amidst the calls for accountability, Parliament summoned KPLC boss Joseph Siror and Energy CS Davis Chirchir over the incident.
The duo is expected to appear before the Energy Committee on Thursday, August 31, to explain why the country was plunged into darkness.
Meanwhile, Kenya Power blamed the power outage on a system failure that occurred in one of its stations.
The utility's board chair, Joy Mdivo, revealed that there was a blackout in its station in Turkana, which is key to the national grid. She maintained that technicians addressed the matter further, revealing that the interruption would span the weekend.
"Turkana being down means a lot of power suddenly is not available to the grid, so the limited power that is there has been prioritized, and only some substations powered back up.
"The engineers have worked all night long, and have managed to get our Turkwel power station to put more into our grid. Today more parts should get connected, but interruptions will still be expected through the weekend," she stated.
