The Standards, Utilities and Wildlife Court (the Electricity Court) on 10th May 2022, convicted and sentenced two residents of Lira District to Three (3) years imprisonment for vandalizing and tampering with electrical installations.
The convicted are Juma Saidi, a scrap dealer and Opio Tomson, both residents in Lira District.
According to court records, on 2nd September 2021, Juma Saidi was found with aluminum cables and rolls of wires worth Uganda Shillings 400 million, vandalized from the Karuma line belonging to Sino Hydro Company Limited. Juma Saidi informed the police that he had received the aluminum wires from Opio Tomson.
Juma Saidi and Opio Tomson were charged and convicted of tampering, theft and conspiracy under Section 81 (1) of the Electricity Act, 1999.
While sentencing the duo, Her Worship Marion Mangeni stated that cases of vandalism are on the rise and that it was necessary to give a custodial sentence to the accused to stop the chain of vandalism. She added that the conviction was a warning to the public and those involved in vandalizing electricity materials to stop or be imprisoned.
The ERA prosecutor, Charlotte Kyohairwe, stated that the accused deserved such a deterrent sentence to enable the other culprits to stop vandalism, which imposes a high cost on electricity consumers through the tariffs.
Between 2016 and 2020, more than Shs20 billion worth of distribution assets (transformers, stay wires, overhead and underground conductors) have been either stolen or destroyed.
The cost of vandalism is huge and both direct and indirect. The destroyed infrastructure has to be restored and usually, the cost of such replacement is met by the taxpayer or the rate payer. In the electricity sector, the sector regulator; Uganda Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA), has to provide for resources to restore such assets, usually, through the tariff.
In addition, the lives of persons within the vicinity of vandalised assets are at stake as the possibility of electrocution (even for the vandals) is high.
Indirectly, the cost of vandalism is immense. An outage brought about by vandalism of the transmission infrastructure may result into national outages that greatly impact negatively on the business sector revenues, but can also lead to loss of lives for people on life support machines in medical facilities.
Insecurity during the course of outages and terrible customer experience are some other hard-to-quantify costs of vandalism.
Government has made considerable efforts in fighting the vice. It has provided security to critical infrastructure such as substations. A special utilities court has also been set up to try those involves in vandalising utility assets.
The Electricity Act gives a maximum penalty of two million Shillings in fines or a three-year jail sentence to offenders convicted of power theft, vandalisation and illegal connection. Below the maximum, the law provides for lighter sentences of caution and community service to the culprits of offences related to electricity theft.
However, such punishments looks too weak to stop the widespread power thefts and vandalism.
Government should also enact harsher punishments for those convicted of vandalism so that vandals are discouraged from this vice. In some cases, vandalism is as dangerous as terrorism since its effect can be as severe such as cutting of power from security installations. Laws, therefore, should be amended to provide for heftier punishments to offenders in order to discourage others from involvement in such activity.
