BAMAKO (Reuters) -Mali owes more than $94 million to the entity managing a dam which also provides power to Senegal and Mauritania, and the debt has become “a question of life and death” for its ability to continue operating, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The funding gap raises the spectre of more electricity supply problems in Mali, where outages in recent years have dented public support for the military government that took power following coups in 2020 and 2021.
The Manantali dam and power plant came online in 2002 and has an installed capacity of 200 megawatts. More than half of what it produces goes to Mali while Senegal gets 33% and Mauritania gets 15%.
Mali currently owes “an enormous amount of more than 54 billion CFA” francs ($94.12 million) to SOGEM, the entity that manages Manantali and several other projects, according to an April 25 letter from SOGEM to the director-general of Energie du Mali, Mali’s electric utility.
“It is now a question of life or death for our installations and for SOGEM,” reads the letter, signed by SOGEM’s director-general, Mohamed Mahmoud Sid’Elemine.
Energie du Mali acknowledged in a statement to Reuters on Thursday that it owed 43.8 billion CFA francs to SOGEM and an additional 11.9 billion CFA francs to a separate entity involved in operating and maintaining the dam.
Asked why the sums had not been paid, it said SOGEM’s projects – including other dams – had “experienced significant delays” that had affected Mali’s energy sector.
The utility “had to compensate for the expected lack of production by resorting to costly solutions, including leasing generators from private operators”, it said.
The letter from SOGEM touts the Manantali project as a success story for regional cooperation that cost hundreds of billions of CFA francs to implement.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are members of the Alliance of Sahel States and announced last year they were leaving the West African economic and political bloc known as ECOWAS.
($1 = 573.7500 CFA francs)
(Reporting by Idrissa Sangare; Writing by Robbie Corey-Boulet; Editing by Ayen Deng Bior and Aidan Lewis)
