The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the company, Pierre Sylva, who briefed the media, said the company is aware of the difficulties people have been encountering in accessing electricity and water services in the Greater Banjul Area. However, he added that as a service provider, it is an obligation for the company to reach out to their customers and the people of the country and tell them some of the challenges that NAWEC is going through recently in its service delivery.
According to Mr. Sylva, at the moment, NAWEC has some of their engines that are due for maintenance and are currently shut down for their maintenance to be carried out.
“When we procure engines from international companies, we do have what is called a warrantee period and that warrantee period is; whenever it has some problems within that warrantee period, it is the supplier of that engine to assess the damages and do the repairs,” he revealed.
According to him, it is an obligation on NAWEC who bought the engines to go by the recommendations of the supplier. The supplier recommends that after the engine operates for a certain number of hours, it has to be shut down for routine maintenance.
He disclosed that at the moment NAWEC is going through such a problem as one of the engines in Brikama and another one in Kotu are due for maintenance and they must be shut down; which he said has already been done.
He said failure to shut them down could develop problems and the supplier would say NAWEC has flouted the recommendations and policy in the contract.
“Engine No.5 in Kotu has some problems and the people that supplied it said, “we need to assess the damages which we are trying to do in order to know what the problems are and when we know the problems, then we would talk to them and if there are parts to procure, then they would start the procurement process and do all the necessary fixings.”
He further disclosed that many of the troubles that NAWEC has right now are around Wellingara, Bijilo and the other communities connected to them. “For some time, we have built a sub-station around the Jabang Forest which was built to decongest the Bijilo and Wellingara sub-stations because we came to realise that their sub-stations were overloaded.So to avoid them tripping all the time, we decided to build it to avoid them causing the company a lot of problem.”
Sylva added that the load at Bijilo and Wellingara is too much for the sub-stations and that is why during the peak period, when people need electricity the most, the sub-stations cannot supply them so they have to load shed some areas to stabilise the system without which they would continue to trip.
