As a university student in Huye (or Butare, as it was known then) close to two decades ago, I found it quite normal to wake up in the dead of the night, put on a warm sweater, and trek to the tiny New Times office, located close to Hotel Credo, to type my weekly column.
The reason I woke up so late was that it was the time the university town would often get its allocation of precious electricity.
Since I didn't have a laptop (not many people did in the early 2000s), the only computer I could use without paying out of pocket was the one available at this publication's office. Sure, I could've used the ones at the university's internet café, but it would have cost me around Rwf 2,000 to do so. And that was money I simply couldn't afford to spend.
My sleep schedule, therefore, was intrinsically linked to Electrogaz's monthly electricity allocation schedule. Some months, we'd have electricity during the day, and I'd get a good night's sleep; other months, I would go to morning class bleary-eyed.
We lived our entire lives and made plans based on the national load-shedding schedule. It actually got to a point where we found it so normal to have electricity only a few hours a day that we'd get confused when we went more than a whole day with power.
Fast forward twenty years, and there are howls of outrage on Twitter when a neighborhood suffers a power outage for a few minutes. To be honest, this brings me a lot of happiness. Not the fact that there has been an outage, but rather the fact that stable electricity is now something that people almost take for granted.
This state of affairs isn't something that happened automatically. Probably over a billion dollars have been spent either rehabilitating power plants and lines or putting in place new ones. And in a world first, the methane gas produced in Lake Kivu's murky depths is no longer just a substance that can kill tens of thousands; Rwanda has harnessed it to light hospitals and power industries.
News out of the energy generation sector has been quite positive recently. Last month, our atomic energy board announced that they'd signed a partnership agreement with a German-Canadian firm to build and test an experimental nuclear reactor by 2027, as part of its ambition to add nuclear fusion into Rwanda’s energy mix by 2032.
Additionally, the Ministry of Infrastructure just announced that all the diesel power plants in the country had been shut down because Rwanda's hydroelectricity and methane gas generation capacitywere sufficient to power the country.
Today, with all the resources spent, Rwanda's installed electricity capacity is slightly over 330 Megawatts. This might sound minuscule when compared to, say, Singapore's capacity of over 12,000 Megawatts. However, what I find most interesting is the fact that we don't consume all the power we generate. In fact, we produce more than we consume at the present.
This fact is especially noteworthy when you look at the price Rwanda is paying because its entire transport network is powered by the internal combustion engine. As global petroleum prices go up and down, so do Rwandan food prices. In 2021, refined petroleum was the largest single import in the country.
According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an international trade data platform, Rwanda imported $302 million worth of refined petroleum. That's the amount of money that built the Kigali Convention Center. Mind you, crude oil prices in April 2021 were about $62 for a barrel of Brent Crude oil, compared to $84 in April of this year.
Logic dictates that we will spend close to half a billion dollars by the end of the year purchasing fuel when we factor in more domestic demand (driven by more vehicles on our roads) and spiraling global costs (driven not only by oil producers but also geopolitical flashpoints in the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the South China Sea).
While the global realities I highlighted above are challenging, Rwanda has something in its back pocket that can help mitigate these challenges: its domestic electricity generation capacity.
The fastest-growing automobile sector in the world is the electric one. In fact, Tesla, Elon Musk's electric car firm, is the world's most valuable automobile company, with a market cap of slightly over $809 billion. Not Toyota. Not General Motors or Mercedes Benz. Tesla. Not only is the future electric, but so is the present. Our officials realized that years ago and came up with a document in 2021 titled the ‘Strategic Paper on Electric Mobility Adaptation in Rwanda’.
Many of the recommendations made in 2021 have been followed. Electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids, as well as their spare parts, can now be imported tax-free, driving down their prices.
However, the biggest challenge to electric mobility (which the Paper also highlighted) hasn't been solved yet: the lack of charging stations not only in urban areas but rural areas as well. Yes, the government now freely avails state land to anyone investing in charging stations, but in my opinion, waiting for the private sector to make these kinds of investments will slow down everything.
Even if you can somehow convince me that the private sector can lead in building these charging networks, I strongly believe the government should not only purchase EVs instead of 'normal' cars but also provide charging stations in ministries and offices for not only their own fleet of cars but also for their staff and visitors. If it did, it wouldn't be the first time that our leadership played a lead role in driving innovation and behavior change. In my experience, where the government goes, our private sector often follows
The writer is a socio-political commentator