There was an embarrassing moment on Wednesday evening when a power blackout forced President William Ruto to read his speech in the dark.

The power blackout occurred twice during the president’s speech in Naivasha. The first of these blackouts occurred when the president was addressing his cabinet secretaries during the National Executive Retreat that has been ongoing in Naivasha.

Although lights were quickly restored, another blackout struck just five minutes later when the president was almost completing his speech.

Undeterred, the president did not comment on the blackouts, whose daily occurrence in Kenya has become an intermittent norm.

Power outages have become so severe that in December, the government announced that it was considering introducing planned power outages that are popularly known as load shedding in South Africa.

According to the Cabinet Secretary for Energy Davis Chirchir, these scheduled power outages would help tame nationwide power blackouts that had become a regular occurrence.

Chirchir had argued that the planned outages would tame high demand for power that has been blamed for causing the outages

“The nationwide blackout was caused by an overload that was witnessed along the Kisumu -Muhuroni line which only carries 80 mega watts.Yesterday the line was carrying 149 Megawatts,” said Chirchir in reference to a national blackout that occurred in December.

“The gist of it is lack of investment in the network for a long time. We will be scheduling some load-shedding.”

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According to Chirchir, the load shedding would have made it possible for the construction of the Narok-Bomet alternative line as well as the completion of the Sondu-Ndhiwa line to avoid overloads on the major Kisumu-Muhuroni power line.

The cabinet secretary had further claimed that the government had not made any investments in power transmission systems in the country over the past six years.

“The country has not had investments for the power transmission system networks for over six years. Government waiting for taxes to build the networks is what has caused this problem,” he had said.