Former Devolution Cabinet Secretary (CS) Charles Keter, who served as Cabinet Secretary for Energy under Uhuru’s government since 2015 has spoken about the mystery surrounding Kenya Power losses. Keter, who resigned last week, from his position to pursue a career in politics revealed that high operating costs, vandalism, and illegal connections are the main reasons behind Kenya Power continues to make a billion losses.

“The revenue of power utilities across the world is not great. They are not doing well because the cost of materials is expensive compared to the revenue base so that really affected the performance of Kenya Power,” Charles Keter said while on an interview with a local media house.

“Vandalism and illegal connections also resulted in system losses. The system losses of KPLC is about 23 percent what is provided for under the EPRA law is about 19.9 percent so therefore before you even sell a kilowatt you are losing about Ksh.5,” added Keter.

As we speak, the electricity distributor has announced plans to send home an estimated 2,000 staff during its execution of the Voluntary Early Retirement (VER) programme as part of the restructuring exercise to potentially save nearly Ksh1.54 billion annually and prevent the company from further sinking.

Keter cited that during his tenure as Energy CS, electricity access in the country increased by 75 percent and opened up to the Citizen TV’s News Night show host, Waihiga Mwaura, that the increment did not reflect anything on Kenya Power’s revenues.

The former CS said that the Jubilee administration had delivered excellent work in terms of nationwide connectivity that stands at around 8.3 million households as of now. He continued on to say that Kenya Power never used any of its capital during the expansion process as the money was raised from international bodies such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Charles Keter intends to contest Kericho’s governorship under the UDA ticket in the coming August general elections.