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A monkey has been blamed for causing a nationwide blackout in Kenya after 'falling onto a transformer at a power station'.

The country on Africa's east coast was without electricity for more than three hours today after the incident shortly after 11.30am local time.

Electricity company KenGen released a statement this afternoon claiming that the outage was the result of an ape climbing on a power station roof and tripping a transformer.

It said: "At 1129 hours this morning, a monkey climbed on the roof of Gitaru Power Station and dropped onto the transformer tripping it.

"This caused other machines at the power station to trip on overload resulting in a loss of more than 180MW form this plant, which triggered a national power blackout.

(Image: Rex)

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"The system has since been restored and all our power generating units are operating normally.

"KenGen power installations are secured by electric fencing which keeps away marauding wild animals.

"We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants."

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The Gitaru power station is the biggest in terms of installed capacity and can serve a fifth of the country's capacity from its 225MW peak power generation, according to the Kenyan Star .

The newspaper claims the outage saw the service industry, which relies on the mains supply, grind to a halt.

Power was restored across the country at around 3pm local time.