Songas employee wins achievement award
Mary Mwanukuzi didn’t have the luxury of hearing her name called as the winner of the Tanzania Women of Achievement Awards in Dar es Salaam on International Women’s Day, 8 March – she was working at the Ubungo plant and was not able to attend. This dedication and commitment to her work is a large part of why she was nominated and of course, why she won.
Mary is the Electrical and Instrumentation Supervisor who leads a team of 6 people responsible for ongoing maintenance and support to the operations team at the power plant. On many occasions Mary has missed family and social occasions as a result of her commitment. In 2006 when the severe drought caused power shutdowns across the country, Mary and her team were required to do numerous 24 hour shifts to maintain the facility to ensure the units kept generating. Whenever an urgent maintenance issue or breakdown occurs, her usual 8 hour day extends until the problem is fixed. Mary recognizes her leadership role and never goes home while her team is working on essential maintenance tasks. If it happens in the middle of the night, Mary heads to Ubungo to sort out the problem. She is affectionately known as the “Iron Lady”, an endearing name assigned by her colleagues out of respect for her hard work, compassion and ability to deal with tough decisions and issues.
She believes that as an Electrical technician, her value is measured by how much she contributes and how much she improves and is willing to learn. She thinks that women process information differently, and bring their own perspective and creativity to the workplace. “This can be a great strength in a team environment,” she says.
Her dedication and leadership encourages others to think along the same lines and by providing good monitoring and maintenance of the Ubungo generation units which has helped to minimize the overall maintenance time and therefore enabling more time to generate at full capacity.
From all of your colleagues at Globeleq we congratulate Mary on her success and extend a big, heartfelt thank you for all her hard work and dedication.