Overpriced, Bingu against importing electricity

"The deal highly favors Mozambique. The agreement is that Malawi should be paying a fee of $1 million per month whether we use the electricity or not.

"This is not feasible and a waste of the country's resources. As long as I am president of this country, I won't allow it to happen," Mutharika told a news conference in the capital Lilongwe on arrival from an African Union (AU) summit in Kampala, Uganda.

Malawi, which generates 285 megawatts of power against a demand of 300 megawatts from hydro power　 announced in January that the World Bank would lend the country the funds to get the power in a Southern Africa Power Poll project to push the capacity to 485 megawatts.

But parliament didn’t approve the bill to authorise the government to borrow the money, saying the monthly fees were too high.

Mutharika says Malawi should instead turn to its abundant water resources to generate its own power.

"Instead of us tapping power from Mozambique, we should invest in power plants to be built in our rivers across the country," he said. "This Malawi-Mozambique interconnection project is a non-starter."

Erratic power supply is singled out by investors as a hindrance to development as power outages cost the agriculture-powered economy $238 million per year, which economic experts is equivalent to 4.4 percent of gross domestic product.

About 98 percent of Malawi's power is generated on the Shire River, which flows out of the giant Lake Malawi　and is the site of four hydro power schemes.

The World Bank has said in its feasibility reports that the net economic benefits of tapping power from Mozambique were $292 million. The Bank says by 2015, Malawi will need　an additional 140 megawatts of power.

The president said the World Bank in the past never made good its promise to help with the privatization of Malawi Telecommunications Limited (MTL) which could have helped provide satellite connection rural Malawians.

"I don’t want to burn my fingers again. Whoever they are sending here should listen to what we want."--maravipost