Speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, the engineer said the unit will be ready around May or June, contrary to what the minister told Parliament this week. “The Chinese will hand it (unit) over around May or June so Mokaila is wrong,” he said. He stated that unit one and four, which have been sporadically supplying power to the country are off. Unit one is failing to raise load beyond 40MW while unit four has a tube leak and boiler problem. “Unit one was being tested to be brought online but it is failing,” he explained.
The engineer said unit three may not be ready for the next two months though Mokaila told Parliament that it will come online at the end of April. He explained that currently, they are stripping parts from unit four to try to patch up unit three. “Unit four is in for a longer outage. After stripping unit four parts, they will then buy spare parts for unit four. The reason they are scrapping unit four to repair unit three is they stripped unit three to repair unit one and unit four initially. Chinese used parts that are ‘Chinese’. Most of them cannot be found in normal hardwares or distributors. Everything about this project is a failure,” he said.
