Kenya Power will buy 600,000 meters in the current financial year as it races to speed up connections and avoid recent outages of the critical electricity kits.
The purchase will bring to more than 1.8 million meters that Kenya Power will have bought since 2022, following closure of court cases that had derailed previous attempts to acquire them.
The utility company was last year forced to delay connecting some 236,924 customers due to what it termed as a shortage of the meters, a stance that was rejected by local manufacturers.
The derailed procurement was mainly attributed to court cases where petitioners and local manufacturers said that the processes were flawed.
“For this financial year, we have a good consignment of meters coming, this year we are buying another 600,000 meters,” John Ngeno, General Manager, Supply Chain and Logistics at Kenya Power said.
“We have already bought some 700,000 and another 500,000. This has helped us install the 450,000 plus that were missing and anyone who applies now will not be kept waiting as has been happening.”
In April 2023, the court barred Kenya Power from proceeding with a Sh22 billion tender for purchase of meters.
A year earlier, the firm had been embroiled in court cases over a Sh2 billion tender to buy single-phase, three-phase postpaid and prepaid meters.
Delayed connections of new customers coupled with hitches in replacing the faulty meters have significantly hampered efforts to grow customers and ultimately boost electricity sales.
Kenya Power had 9,456,158 customers at the end of last year, a growth of 2.6 percent from 9,212,754 six months earlier.
The utility made a pre-tax profit of Sh538 million in the six months ended December last year compared to a loss before tax of Sh1.58 billion in the same period of 2022.
Court cases that have plagued efforts to buy new meters also prompted the company to consider seeking approval from the Ministry of Energy and the National Treasury to be allowed to use Specially Permitted Procurement (SPP) to get critical equipment.
The SPP model allows entities to get critical equipment where normal procurement is hindered by market conditions or other circumstances among four other scenarios.
“In future, we need to go for Specially Permitted whereby the government allows what we call critical kits to be bought from some people but at negotiated prices. That is an approach we want to use,” Dr Ngeno said.
The Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act however compels government entities to seek approval from the National Treasury whenever they wish to procure goods or services via the SPP model.
