Transport and Roads Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has credited himself with significantly reducing the time it takes for backup generators to kick in at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) during power outages.
Murkomen claims to have cut the delay from two hours to around 30 minutes, a significant improvement but still not ideal. He acknowledged the frustration caused by the delays and expressed his commitment to finding a permanent solution.
The Transport Minister attributed previous delays to problems synchronizing two generators purchased in August. He explained that these generators failed to activate during power outages in August and November due to “unsuccessful synchronization.”
“I was assured that they had been synchronized for automatic switchover as soon as electricity goes off,” Murkomen stated in an interview on Spice FM. “A month ago there was a blackout and the generator did not kick in. The explanation I got was that the synchronization was not successful.”
Despite the challenges, Murkomen emphasized that he has managed to improve the situation. “People say that I promised the country that it will not happen again, but you must give me credit to the fact that I reduced the madness from two hours to 20 or 30 minutes,” he said.
To permanently fix the issue, the government plans to purchase two additional generators to act as backups in the event of power outages. Murkomen also plans to bolster the airport’s technical team with skilled personnel capable of managing and maintaining the generators.
“All those positions, we are now filling them so that we have the human resource that is going to do the job,” he said. “Everything depends on the human resource.”
While acknowledging the progress made, Murkomen admitted that his initial goal of completely eliminating power delays was overly optimistic. He expressed his determination to overcome the remaining challenges.
“I failed to get to zero the way I wanted to. My expectations and we underestimated the depth of the problem,” he said. “Having walked down to that level, I can now say that we will move this problem to zero and we are not going to have the same problem happening.”
