Must it take whole ministers to senseproblems with agencies underthem?

The intervention sought to allow for investigations relating to suspicions of dereliction of duty by the experts singled out.

This has been happening for a while of late, and it is clear that the cabinet is being proactive against those not working in the nation’s interest.

The minister, who was on an inspection tour of the substations, later gave the authorities 14 days to investigate the managers and chief engineers.

What led to the suspension orders was the discovery of what the minister treated as negligence at the substations, including absence from work stations and not being accountable in discharging set responsibilities.

That is how the matter could be roughly put, though formally it isn’t supposed to be the case, as there are controls all the way up to the top management.

Ordinarily, then, such issues often don’t reach the board of directors – that someone was cautioned for three days’ absence, etc. But for a whole minister to have to take issues up in person implies that these controls aren’t functioning well enough.

Looking at the run of story as narrated by the Energy minister, it is an investigative report from elsewhere which the minister may have requested, and he explained the reasons – namely, the frequency of power outages of late.

On the basis of what he said, the matter would easily be explained in a technical manner by the TANESCO authorities, though that line of explanation may not satisfy more inquisitive authorities.

So the minister ruled that it was unacceptable for both the manager and chief engineer to be absent from work stations without valid cause, and that all plants were being repaired simultaneously.

When the minister says that such a situation is unacceptable and amounts to gross negligence, what can rapidly be gleaned from that assessment is that the outages were being purposefully created.

There was a time in the past when “repairs” at a power station would be a sufficient explanation to the public, and there is a spirit of tolerating that kind of situation in the management and in the board.

However, without an acutely proactive cabinet, all this goes unnoticed – and the company seeks more subsidies.

The minister decided to overwork himself. He demanded that the TANESCO board ensure that an expert in connecting the device for boosting power that broke down at one of the substations do the job within three days so that the substation resumed normal functions.

This tells many stories and sub-stories which, the good minister rightly elected to listen to and act on – and the magic seems to work. We only hope there are useful lessons here worth learning from.