Yemen is witnessing an unprecedented hot summer with high temperatures that hit all Yemeni regions and governorates, especially coastal areas that are experiencing very tough days due to the inferno of this weather and the deterioration of public services.
The summer high temperatures and humidity make electricity an urgent and indispensable necessity for citizens in general and coastal residents in particular.
However, the entry of summer in Yemen coincides with the intensification of heat on the coastal areas, as is the case of Aden and Hodeidah, in which the summer becomes an additional hell for the population, where they face high temperature and exhausting humidity. Despite the harshness of the hot weather, the electricity and water cuts are the most difficult and the most severe impact on the city's residents.
The tragedy of power cuts in Aden and the Yemeni coastal cities is repeated every year with the advent of summer, and over the course of successive governments, this crisis has remained intractable, and the exhausted citizens have no choice but to face their fate alone.
And thus, in the middle of each year, the people of Aden live a hot and stifling summer in the shadow of indifference and carelessness to people's lives. The successive authorities in Aden inherit this disaster every year without thinking about finding solutions that would solve the chronic problem and alleviate the miserable life of its residents.
While people are suffering, the officials in the Presidential Leadership Council and the internationally recognized government are enjoying a cold and air-conditioned atmosphere, with a complete failure to solve the problem of electricity, which is increasingly cut off during the summer and turns people's lives into hell.
Poor service challenge
This year, with the advent of the summer when the temperature approaches forty degrees, amid the absence of almost total electricity service, children and the elderly in intensive care in Aden hospitals were the first victims of this deterioration in the electric power service.
According to information obtained by Khuyut, patients at Al-Jumhuriya Hospital in Aden are facing a dire situation that threatens their lives as a result of electricity cuts. Most of them are women and elderly patients with diabetes and high blood pressure.
Similarly, Residents of the city of Al-Hodeidah (northwest of Yemen) suffer from severe high temperatures, electricity cuts, severe deterioration of living, extreme poverty and a widespread deterioration in public services.
In the midst of this great chaos, a number of hospitals in Aden rushed to send a distress call to the relevant authorities in the city, which is the temporary capital of the internationally recognized government, to rescue the patients in the intensive care who are at risk of death due to the cessation of the oxygen production plant as a result of the oil derivatives crisis in Al-Jumhuriya Teaching Hospital in Aden.
Further, doctors and workers in the health sector report that the current situation with the deterioration of electricity services has become very difficult for many medical and health facilities that face many challenges that are difficult to deal with. Similarly, the city’s residents express their discontent with the increasing hours of power outages on a daily basis.
The scale of the societal suffering in the city of Aden is expanding, and its effects touch the lives and livelihoods of people, especially with the advent of the summer, when the temperature is intense, with the water supply being delayed due to the power outage.
Social activist, Rahaf Najeeb Yabli, points out that the situation has worsened severely with the interruption of water supply through the public water network to the extent that water began to disappear in many neighborhoods such as Crater, Al Mualla, and even Sheikh Othman.
She asserts that the problem of power outage is extremely chromic and difficult, with this service turning into a punishment for the residents of the city of Aden, in light of the existing problem with the owners of rented power generators who threaten to stop supplying Aden with electricity if the dues for commercial electricity consumption are not paid.
Energy Contracts
The electricity crisis in Aden is not a result of today, but rather extended for years in the absence of effective solutions to the problem that continues to escalate despite the establishment of a new diesel power station named “President Hadi” station, and the Aden Electricity Corporation announced the start of its trial operation in late October 2020 with a generating capacity of more than 500 megawatts, but this emerging plant has not yet entered the actual service.
While, in the middle of last year 2021, Yemen obtained a Saudi oil grant to finance Aden electricity, which the competent government authorities faced a big problem in absorbing, which forced the concerned authorities there to find alternative emergency solutions by purchasing commercial energy leased from private companies in the field of electric power generation.
Journalist and media reporter Saleh al-Hanashi, in his interview with "Khuyut", refers to numerous imbalances in the purchased energy contracts signed with some companies, which he believes that there is a suspicion of corruption around them. Al-Hanashi accuses the Supreme Council of Energy, in addition to senior employees of the General Electricity Corporation, who are behind the corruption in the electricity in Aden; Because they receive imaginary payments and salaries from the purchased energy companies, and therefore they work to destroy government stations and keep the electricity file monopolized by only four purchased commercial energy companies.
Cruel Suffering
The situation is not much different in Al-Hodeidah (northwest Yemen), whose residents suffer from extreme high temperatures, electricity cuts, severe deterioration of living, extreme poverty and a widespread deterioration in public services.
Some citizens of Hodeidah residents express their astonishment at the constant power cuts and the intensification of crises in the hot summer, while the situation is not like this in the winter, when citizens do not need to run fans and air conditioners to relieve the heat that exfoliates their bodies.
On the evening of the sixth of June, activists launched a wide electronic campaign on social media, Facebook and Twitter, under the hashtag #Hodeidah-Die #Thama-stricken as an expression of their dissatisfaction with the current situation experienced by the residents of Hodeidah Governorate, in a ruthless summer that is faced in the complete absence of electricity service.
"The deterioration of health services is one of the most important causes of epidemics and diseases in Al Hudaydah Governorate," Bassim Janani, a civil activist, said in his tweet on Twitter as part of the online campaign.
Campaign activists said that in the year 2020, the amount of support for the Hodeidah Electricity Fund from the port’s revenues amounted to about 14 billion riyals, and that the total fund today is 21 billion riyals. Activists are calling for using the funds from the Hodeidah Electricity Support Fund to supply the public power and relieve people in the summer and provide electricity for free, as happens in Aden or at a price that is commensurate with the situation of citizens and their living situation.
Hundreds of thousands of the governorate’s residents have been languishing for more than seven years under a storm of living crises, which are compounded by hot summer days in which the temperature reaches 45 degrees. Besides, the activists in the electronic campaign confirm that the Hodeidah summer turns every year into another face of hell that exceeds people's ability to tolerate it.
