Thieves cost EDM 250,000 dollars

Mozambique’s publicly owned electricity company, EDM, lost about 250,000 US dollars during the first quarter of the current year, due to vandalization of its infrastructures across the country.

The losses were announced on Monday, in Maputo, by the Administrator for the Commercial, Distribution and IT Area of the company, Francisco Inroga, who stressed that “the stolen electrical materials are for the business of selling scrap metal to the craft industry for the manufacture of domestic utensils, such as: grids, traps, carts, and other purposes.”

He was speaking in a meeting which joined public and private companies to reflect on the problem of the vandalization of public infrastructures.

According to the electricity provider, the amount lost during the first three months of the year would serve to provide electricity to 50,000 people in the southern region of the country, where the highest number of cases is registered.

″In 2021, we lost about 16 million dollars to acts of vandalism and in the first quarter of this year alone we lost about 250,000 dollars. With the amount lost last year, from the calculations made, we could have supplied more than 190,000 families. And the value lost in the first quarter of this year would serve at least 50,000 people in the southern area that has been the most affected″, he explained.

In connection with the crimes from 2021, he added, 95 people have been arrested. “Vandalism” is a mild term for what is, in fact, large scale theft of copper and aluminium cables and other metallic equipment.

The thieves, Inroga said, want “to extract a very appetizing material on the market which is copper. Much of our electrical infrastructure like cables, transformers, conductors are made of copper”.

Copper stolen from EDM, he added, often ends up on the South African market, so “we are working with the police, customs authorities, and other stakeholders″.

To respond to the vandalization, according to Inroga, EDM, through public-private partnerships, has been seeking alternative solutions to prevent and fight the thieves.

In turn, the director of logistics and general services at the public mobile phone company Tmcel, António Faria, said that his institution has lost, in the last three years, through vandalism and the theft of electrical material, an estimated value of one million US dollars.

The acting director of operations at s second mobile phone company, Vodacom, Mateus Moiane, said that his institution has been registering the same phenomenon since the year 2015.

“We have lost around 207 million meticais (about 3.23 million dollars) since 2015, an amount that would be enough for us to build about 35 masts. This phenomenon happens in almost all areas of the country but with more intensity in the city and province of Maputo, Inhambane, Tete and Nampula”, he explained.