Tunisia’s President Kais Saied has sacked the chief executive officer of the Tunisian Electricity and Gas Company (STEG) Hichem Anane following a nationwide outage that hit the North African country on Wednesday.
In a statement, President Saied said he has appointed Faycal Trifa as Anane’s replacement.
Trifa is an engineer who has worked at STEG for several years. He held the position of project manager for substations, lines and electrical cables at the electricity firm since 2019.
A nationwide power outage hit Tunisia on Wednesday morning after fire broke out at STEG’s power station in Rades, 15 kilometres southeast of the capital Tunis.
Due to the power blackout, transport, mobile, internet and other businesses dependent on electricity were disrupted.
'Technical glitch'
STEG cited a technical glitch as the cause of the power disruption.
“The cause is purely technical and has nothing to do with any explosion,” Mounir Ghabri, the director of communications at STEG, told Radio Mosaique.
Electricity supply was gradually restored in Tunisia later Wednesday.
Power cuts are rare in Tunisia, where electricity coverage is almost 100%, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Tunisia mostly relies on gas imports to meet its primary energy needs, with almost 97% of its electricity generation coming from gas as of 2016.
