What has happened at ESCOM is an embarrassment to the nation and should not be tolerated

ON ESCOM’s VENDING SYSTEM OUTAGE Malawi software developer and analyst Isaac Banda writes.

I assume that ESCOM ‘s pre-paid metering system has two critical components: the Meter Data Management System (MDMS) and the Vending System (VS).

The MDMS is responsible for managing customer accounts, billing information, and tokens, while the VS handles the sale and distribution of electricity tokens. Both MDMS and VS require a server to run on and a Database Management System (DBMS) to store and manage pre-paid metering data.

To ensure high availability and data protection for the MDMS and VS, ESCOM should have implemented a redundant server that always runs in parallel with the primary server, ready to take over in case the primary server fails.

However, it appears that this was not done, as customers would have been able to buy tokens without noticing the failure of the primary server. If having a redundant server is expensive, ESCOM could have cloned the hard drives for the server and maintained regular backups for the MDMS and VS data. If they had done this, restoring the VS or the entire metering system would not have taken three days.

They would have simply plug in the cloned hard drives and then restore data from backups.

There are also alternative backup solutions (cloud based or on-premises) they could have implemented to prevent the current VS outage. However, it seems that what ESCOM had in place was very basic, requiring a time-consuming process to recover everything from scratch.

Alternatively, we could assume that ESCOM lacks the technical capacity to handle such issues and is waiting for the supplier of the metering system to resolve the problem. If that’s the case, it would be a colossal mistake. ESCOM should have built internal capacity to ensure the long-term sustainability of the system.

What has happened at ESCOM is an embarrassment to the nation and should not be tolerated. And I hope other institutions will learn from this mistake and put their houses in order. Otherwise, we can’t keep on providing poor services for ever and expect to develop the country beyond the current status.