You are Mutinta Chanda, Director-General of the Zambeka Energy Regulation Authority (ZERA). Cabinet has given you 120 days to publish a single plan that buys 600 MW of new generation, takes electricity access from 43% to 60% and adds not one kwacha to a ZMK 4.1 billion subsidy. The first page of that plan has to say what actually stands in the way.
The situation
Zambeka has 2,800 MW of installed capacity, about 80% of it hydropower. A multi-year drought has cut firm hydro output by 35%. Rolling cuts leave homes and firms without power six to eight hours a day, and part of the gap is filled with emergency diesel at ZMK 3.20 per kilowatt-hour.
The state utility, Zambeka Power Company (ZPC), generates and sells almost all the country's electricity and is technically insolvent: its average tariff of ZMK 0.92/kWh recovers 71% of the cost of supply, and the Treasury covers the other 29% with a ZMK 4.1 billion subsidy a year. A single tariff rise of about 30% is under discussion, four months after a bitterly contested by-election, with consumer associations already organising.
The only generation that can be built inside 24 months is renewable plants from private producers, bought competitively, and ZERA has just been given a mandate, never yet used, to run that auction itself. Developers would sign twenty-year contracts with ZPC, a buyer below investment grade. Reaching 60% access means connecting about 1.9 million more households, most of them rural: ZMK 9,500 per grid connection, or ZMK 3,200 for a mini-grid or standalone solar system, which do not appear in the grid-reliability figures Cabinet follows.
If ZERA publishes nothing within 120 days, the auction mandate goes back to the Ministry. You spent nine years at a development bank appraising generation projects, and watched several be signed and announced and never built. Your name is on the cost-of-supply study that everyone accepted and no one acted on.