The Political Economy of the Next Wave of Power Sector Reforms in Africa: Evidence from Zimbabwe, Kenya and Namibia

The past decade has seen rapid innovations in energy technologies and business models, especially the breakthrough of low-cost renewable and distributed energy resources. These innovations are prompting a new wave of reforms on how the power sector should be organized, operated, and regulated. This study asks how political economy factors will shape the redesign of power markets in Africa that is prompted by the growing share of variable renewables. The study draws on three bodies of literature- standard power sector reform, current innovations inducing a new wave of reforms, and political economy as applied to the power sector. We combine these bodies of literature to provide an analytical framework that offers deeper insights into the implications of the growing share of variable renewable energy technologies and distributed energy resources on power market design, system operation, and regulation in Africa. The comparative case study of Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Namibia draws on the analysis of qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews. In each of the three countries we interviewed senior professionals in regulatory authorities, government departments, power utilities, development finance institutions, and the private sector who are key to the reform process of the power sector in and who have contributed to policy, governance, regulatory and operational changes in the electricity supply industry. We find that of the three countries, only Namibia seems to have a political objective to maintain cost reflective tariffs while in both Zimbabwe and Kenya, political actors favour low tariffs as a means of retaining control and remaining in power especially towards election season. We conclude that the political economy of African countries is best suited to regulatory instruments which avoid privatization but include private participation in some form. This satisfies the dominant nationalist ideology but can achieve good performance. Furthermore, the study shows that effective integration of distributed energy resources requires sending the right economic signals with granularity in space and time. However, this requires a level of sophistication that may be beyond reach in the context of African power markets at present.