Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Energy and Power Development has appealed to the Parliamentary Portfolio on Energy to assist it in regaining the coal and coal-bed methane gas special grants it held in the north-west of the country, which were revoked by the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development in 2009 after the Zimbabwe Power Corporation (ZPC) had failed to comply with several reporting conditions.

Special Grant 4251, which is located in the Western Coal Area and was issued to ZPC in 2005, was revoked by the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development in November 2009, after ZPC had been found to have violated the terms of issue by engaging in explora- tion without government approval, operating without an approved control-of-citing-of-work plan, operating without a mine development plan detailing extraction methods, operating without a manager and failing to notify the Ministry, in writing, of its intent to start mining.

ZPC – a power generation company – and its parent, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority, fall under the Ministry of Energy and Power Development.

Another special grant issued to ZPC in the Sinamatella Coal Area was also withdrawn for the same reasons.

In 2010, an inter-Ministerial committee convened to dis- cuss short-term strategies for stabilising national power supplies directed that ZPC be reallocated the Western Area Coal special grant in order to enable the company to imple- ment the Hwange Power Station (HPS) expansion project, an order which has been ignored by the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development.

ZPC’s Hwange expansion project has failed to take off because the company has neither the coal concessions nor coal mines to support expansion of the power sta- tion. Energy and Power Development Permanent Secretary Partson Mbiriri says the country will continue to face a power crisis unless the HPS expansion project goes ahead.

He says the cancellation of the grants has adversely affected ZPC’s planning and project implementation and “killed the attractiveness of ZPC projects to potential investors”.

“We continue to engage the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development . . . and, hopefully, we can have a meeting of minds. “This honourable committee has to assist us to that end because it is difficult to comprehend why, where Cabinet has made a ruling, it is difficult to operationalise that Cabinet decision.”