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Has Kenya Joined the Band of Load shedding Nations?

Has Kenya Joined the Band of Load shedding Nations?

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November 05, 2025

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Hi 👋🏽 It's Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.

A few weeks ago where I live (across Dagoretti South), we experienced periodic power blackouts that Kenya Power was unwilling to resolve. The outage always began at a specific time in the evening, throughout the night till around noon the following day.

These were not scheduled cuts for maintenance, and the utility's excuse that certain lines were being repaired did not make sense because power was always restored and disconnected at the same time every day. I suspected that there we were being secretly rationed.

Although the situation quelled after the week the late Hon. Raila Odinga was buried, most of my evenings are spent wondering if I will experience an outage. A momentary look into Kenya Power's social media pages reveals that outages countrywide have become endemic.

Yesterday, President William Ruto mentioned something starkly clear: the nation’s power grid is straining under growing demand and stalled generation. He acknowledged what some of us had suspected, bluntly stating that electricity was being rationed to manage the limited supply.

If this is the case, why is Kenya Power yet to officially communicate? or was the president highlighting a plan that is on the books?

One can detect an ostensible unwillingness to admit that Kenya is on a load shedding spree. For a long time, the exercise has been a national embarrassment for South Africa, Africa's largest economy. It also ranks us among countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Burundi, and Nigeria — all notorious for unreliable electricity. To admit that your country cannot provide enough power at all times for everyone in the 21st century is not easy.

For ordinary households and businesses, intermittent electricity wreaks havoc on everything from cold storage to digital payment systems. President Ruto, an ever ambitious man, says the country will need more dams to harness power but will this be achievable?

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Your Opinion

Based on your experiences over the past one month, would you say that power outages have become too problematic (possibly affirming that load shedding is going on)?

The Invisible Labor Force

By Fred Obura

In Kenya, women shoulder the overwhelming share of unpaid domestic labor ; cooking, cleaning, childcare, work that, if valued at market rates, amounted to nearly KSh 2 trillion in 2021, a sum equivalent to almost a quarter of the nation’s GDP.

According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ household satellite account, women performed more than five times the meal preparation and management tasks done by men, dominated cleaning and home maintenance, and bore the bulk of childcare responsibilities, while men contributed largely in repairs and maintenance, highlighting the stark gendered division of labor.

Acknowledging this work could reshape public policy: expanding childcare access, improving parental leave, and designing care-friendly workplaces could liberate women to participate more fully in paid employment, turning invisible labor into economic and social leverage.

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The Boda Boda Boom

By Harry Njuguna

The motorcycle market appears to have shaken off the doldrums of the pandemic, with August registrations hitting levels unseen since mid‑2022, signaling a broader rebound in both personal mobility and commercial delivery networks.

After years of suppressed sales, tighter credit, and rising import costs, riders and fleet operators are cautiously resuming replacement cycles, while financing conditions have stabilized enough to restore market confidence. Car & General, a key distributor, has quietly captured much of this momentum, reporting sharp gains in revenue and profits as demand steadily returns. Meanwhile, electric motorcycles are beginning to register on the radar, but for now the roar of internal‑combustion engines still dominates city streets and delivery routes across the country.

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OPINION: The Keys to Unlock South Africa's Oil and Gas Exploration

By NJ Ayuk

South Africa sits atop the lion’s share of the Orange Basin, a marine formation that could hold billions of barrels of oil, yet the country has drilled exactly zero wells in recent years while neighboring Namibia pushes ahead with booming exploration.

Legal hurdles, drawn-out permitting, and NGO challenges have created a labyrinthine system that discourages investment and frustrates operators, even as global competitors quietly capitalize just across the border.

As NJ Ayuk shows, community engagement and clear, enforceable standards are emerging as the twin keys to unlocking these offshore riches, with lessons to be drawn from Suriname and Namibia’s successes.

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