NAIROBI, Kenya -- Power went off across Kenya on Saturday and the nation of 29 million people will be largely without electricity for the next two days because of technical problems, the electric company said.

Electricity went off about 6:30 p.m. throughout the capital, Nairobi, and in most other parts of the country.

In a statement on national radio, the Kenya Power and Lighting Company said a "major fault" had occurred in transmission of power from neighboring Uganda. It said the problem would take two days to fix.

That means this East African nation will be largely without power, except for those who have private generators. A few private hospitals have generators, but there were no immediate reports on emergency measures for other public facilities.

A crisis in Kenya's domestic electricity production has left it dependent on electricity from Uganda and has forced it into severe rationing for private and commercial consumers.

President Daniel arap Moi has on several occasions blamed the power shortage on the prolonged drought in the region, which has slashed output from Kenya's hydroelectric dams. Other members of his administration have blamed the World Bank for withdrawing funding for power projects in the early 1990s.

The World Bank, however, dismissed those claims Friday, saying Moi's government was to blame for the power crisis because of its delays in implementing new projects.

World Bank country director Harold Wackman said that if the government had followed an agreed-upon schedule, seven new power plants - two funded by institutions linked to the World Bank - would have been commissioned between 1998 and 2000. Those projects were to have been completed by this year.

"This analysis shows that the present power crisis is caused much more by the long delays in the implementation of the planned projects than the failure of the long rains or the suspension of World Bank funding," Wackman said.

"These are the facts about the current power supply crisis," he said in a statement. "Attempts to distort them or pass the buck won't solve the crisis."

The World Bank halted funding for Kenyan power projects in the early 1990s, but resumed lending after the government passed reforms in the energy sector.