Sylvain Mandigu, a Kinshasa resident, is fed up. "For the past month, we've lived in the dark, forced to use firelight and storm lamps. It's unacceptable," he fumed.

Residents of the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital city already have their fair share of daily hardships, but for the past three months poor electricity supply has sent whole neighbourhoods into pitch darkness and forced factories to slow production.

With Kinshasans angry as presidential and legislative elections approach in November, President Joseph Kabila recently replaced the heads of Societe Nationale d'Electricite, the national power utility.

He also visited the Inga dam in the country's west, the ageing hydroelectric electricity complex that is the reason for Kinshasa's persistent darkness.

Plans are underway to rehabilitate the plants and to build massive new stations on the powerful Inga falls, which lie in a narrow strip of DRC territory through which the Congo River runs down to the Atlantic coast.

Studies have said modernised power stations at Inga would be able to generate enough to provide electricity to all of southern Africa.

Yet for now, lack of investment together with rapid population growth have left this country of 67 million residents, poverty-stricken despite vast natural mineral wealth and ravaged by civil and local conflicts over the past decade, with one of the lowest levels of electricity consumption in the world.

Overall, the country has an electrification rate of just 10 percent but until recently, the capital had fared better.

For Leny Ilondo, head of local charity SOS Kinshasa, the government did the right thing by "throwing out" the old management team, "but the problem is more than one of persons", he said.

Since April, the flow of the Congo River has slowed considerably. River authorities say it is now at 20,000 cubic metres per second when it should be twice that.

But the power grid in Kinshasa is also considered a "white elephant" and overwhelmed, with at least eight of the 14 turbines that make up the two power plants at Inga dam broken.

However "you can have the 14 Inga machines in operation but the grid can only transit 400 to 420 megawatts. You won't have the 1,700 megawatts (that can) be generated at Inga," said Daniel Yengo, part of the sacked management team.

"The shortage can only be met when the second transmission line is built two years from now," he said while adding that "maybe" the fall in river flow was due to climate change.

Ilondo, like many experts, blames the lack of dredging over the last three years.

"The problem is that conduits towards the turbine reservoirs are filled with sand" and not the water levels, said Ilondo.

The Inga dam, which usually generates 800 megawatts, is currently generating only 300.

Kinshasa requires 650 megawatts for its electricity needs.

Sylvain Mandiagu, 23, said that in his eastern Kinshasa suburb, the electric current turns on at one o'clock in the morning and cuts off at three.

Kinshasa residents have "forgotten how to iron their clothes" and could no longer use their refrigerators, said Alfred, an unemployed man in his 40s.

Andre, a civil servant, said the "solution is to create two electricity companies and generate competition."

To reduce the shortfall in the mining province of Katanga, the public utility imported up to 120 megawatts from neighbouring Zambia. In May, the company launched a $51.5 million emergency programme to improve electricity distribution in Kinshasa.