Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. POWER utility Zesa Holdings has secured a US$210 million facility from Afreximbank as it moves to strengthen its infrastructure network and import electricity.
The facility, which was sealed on the sidelines of IATF2025, represents the biggest kitty any Zimbabwean firm has secured at Africa’s single largest trade fair.
It also underscores Afreximbank’s confidence in local firms despite the economic headwinds
Under the facility, US$50 million will be used to import electricity from Mozambican power utility, Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), according to Fredy Mazana, the finance director for Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company.
“We are also going to use it to upgrade our network and the transmission and distribution system. We are going to use about U$50 million for that,” he said.
Part of the resources will be deployed to buy the materials required to manufacture transformers and “augment that with those from private suppliers”.
Mazana said Zesa would deploy part of the resources to accelerate the smart metering project, which aided the efficient use of electricity.
He said the power utility would install smart meters targeting large-scale users.
“We are going to implement the metered management system where the post-paid meters will be converted to smart meters,” Mazana said.
“We have a platform that will house the wallet where we will switch them off remotely when they run out of power.”
He said the power utility would replace vandalised transformers.
Zesa Holdings has been facing increased vandalism despite the existence of a stiff penalty for offenders.
“A number of customers are off supply because the infrastructure has been vandalised. So we are going to buy cables and transformers,” he said, adding that the power utility would use part of the resources to upgrade to equipment which identified faults.
“System controllers are unable to see areas that have faults and cannot isolate them. So if a fault happens it takes them time to notice which areas. The Scada [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] will identify areas with problems,” Mazana said.
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