The inhabitants of Tamatave are plunged into darkness. For more than 24 hours, this eastern coastal city, Madagascar’s second city and economic capital, was completely without electricity. Tensions on the distribution network of Jirama, the national electricity company, are usual. But faced with these hours of uninterrupted outage, some users could not contain their anger and took to the streets this Thursday.
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With our correspondent in Antananarivo, Pauline Le Troquier
It was 9 p.m. this Thursday evening when groups of demonstrators – several hundred, according to testimonies collected – began burning tires in several working-class neighborhoods of the city. Honja lives in one of them, the Ambolmadinika district. “ The gendarmes threw tear gas to scare people away because the demonstrators were throwing stones and [morceaux de] wood everywhere “, he said.
“ Around 10 p.m., continues Honja, the power came back, as if by chance, perhaps out of fear that people would demonstrate again or even manage to set fire to the Jirama »
According to a source from the Tamatave gendarmerie, four people were arrested for throwing stones at the police. The Jirama site has for its part been secured for fear of other excesses.
Roland Ratsiraka, the city’s opposition deputy, denounces a problem of bad governance within the state company, regularly affected by corruption cases. “ It’s a real scandal, the likes of which we have rarely experienced, he accuses. For years, I have been denouncing the mismanagement within Jirama. We know that a few thieves are put in prison, but the biggest bosses are untouchable, even though we are talking about several million dollars of embezzlement. “.
Jirama apologized to the affected users and attributed this interruption to a “ fuel supply delay “. Although electricity was restored to Tamatave on Thursday evening, several sources reported intermittent power outages during the day of Friday March 15.
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