A report by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) indicates that more than 650,000 Kenyan homes might have been illegally connected to the national grid in 2019, leading to massive system losses that cost Kenya Power billions.

The report revealed a variance of 678,684 between the number of people who said they were connected during the 2019 census and the official figures given by power distributor Kenya Power on domestic connections the same year.

Further, KNBS data shows that 6,069,680 households, or 50.4 percent, were connected to the mains electricity, a higher figure than the 5,390,396 the State-owned firm gave the same year.

Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu said that Illegal power connections are one of the causes of system losses that the power distributor recovers by passing on the cost to consumers, pushing up the cost of power.

“These losses contribute to high power charges to the consumers since the industry regulator allows the company to charge up to 19.9 percent of the power losses to consumers,” she said.

Kenya Power and Electricity Company (KPLC) loses about 20 percent in revenues from fraud and illegal connections.

In the year ended June 2021, consumers paid Kes 20.1 billion to the utility firm for electricity theft and leakages from an aging transmission network.