‘Livingstone needs solarpowered street lights’

LIVINGSTONE City Council should put up solar-powered street lights as Zesco generated power is expensive, Livingstone Member of Parliament (MP) Matthews Jere has said. The MP cited Lusaka, Ndola and Chipata as areas where solarpowered street lights were being used on a sustainable basis. He said in an interview that civic leaders and their management teams in other areas had realised that it was expensive to use Zesco powered street lighting system Mr Jere said Livingstone City Council had no capacity to sustain the ZESCO pre-paid street lights as the revenue base was too narrow. "The programme of street lights came at a time when the revenue base for the council was very low and it was because of hosting of United Nations World Tourism Organisation conference that such a system was used. Otherwise the council did not plan for that and how to sustain it. “The Livingstone City Council cannot afford the ZESCO pre-paid street lights. We need to change to solar. We need to migrate otherwise we might find ourselves in darkness like the current situation on other streets," he said. Mr Jere said the local authority should move with the changing times and technology in order to ensure that operations remained afloat. "It is high time that we learnt how to plan and think outside the box, otherwise we might be doing a disservice to the people," Mr Jere said. Meanwhile, Mr Jere said all Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects that had been completed would be handed over to the community soon.