Ghana: Minority Suggests To Gov’t Steps To Resolve Power Outages

Minority Parliamentarians in the Republic of Ghana are on the heels of the Akufo-Addo-led government for allegedly mismanaging the West African nation’s power sector, resulting in the current outages being experienced in most parts of the country.

The West African nation has been facing challenges with its transmission system, resulting in intermittent power supply.

The country’s Energy Minister, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh has blamed the situation on technical challenges and on many occasions urged Ghanaians to exercise patience as steps are being taken to address them.

At a press conference addressed by the Ranking Member on Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament and former Deputy Minister for Power, John Jinapor, the Minority chided the government for its inconsistent communications on the current power challenges which have led to intermittent power cuts in parts of the country.

“It should be noted that since the beginning of the year, GRIDCo alone has given six different reasons for the major national outages aside the intermittent localised blackouts, with the most ridiculous reason being attributed to trees falling on high tension transmission lines,” Mr Jinapor observed.

“Today, not only are we witnessing unreliable supply of power but the obnoxious double track system has been exported to the power sector under this government,” the MP added.

In view of those observations, he urged the government to come clean on the real cause of the power challenges.

“It is obvious there is something more serious happening within Ghana’s energy sector beyond the unconvincing excuses and blame game by managers of the sector,” Mr Jinapor said.

Excerpts of the Minority’s press statement

The minority in Parliament taking cognisance of the current erratic and unreliable power supply coupled with the lack of sincerity on the part of Government officials and handlers of the power sector, the Minority in furtherance to our commitment towards ensuring reliable and uninterrupted supply of power proposes the following 10 point recommendations for implementation;

1. The Energy sector players must be proactive and inform (Publish a schedule) electricity consumers who will be affected by these outages in advance so that affected customers can take remedial steps to mitigate the effect of such outages.

2. Government must cut down on wasteful expenditure and Inject the much needed capital into the power sector especially GRIDCo to make up for the impaired cash flow of these utilities.

3. Government must desist from political interference in the management of the Energy sector. Consequently, Government must refrain from engaging in political appointments especially within middle management levels when vacancies are declared.

4. Government and its communicators must desist from engaging in the propaganda on excess capacity and come out with a formula for absorbing capacity charges as part of operating cost.

5. Power sector managers must ensure that they pursue Long term planning to ensure fuel security for generating assets at the least cost possible.

6. Government must allow Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to take the responsibility for their fuel supply requirements.

7. Immediate steps must be taken to aggressively address ECG’s spiralling technical and commercial losses currently estimated by its worker unions at 34%

8. The Ministry of Energy must conduct a comprehensive reconciliation of the total indebtedness of all players including government and its SOEs including (GNPC, GNGC, VRA, GRIDCo, CENIT, ECG, NEDCo) in a transparent manner.

9.The Ministry of finance must take steps to utilize the $1 billion sovereign bond borrowed in 2020 to address the financial challenges of the Energy sector.

10. Government must ensure that Energy sector SOEs Publish details of their financial statements including details and ageing of their indebtedness as well as debts owed to them on time.

Finally, Government must come clean on the current power crisis as a matter of urgency and desist from engaging in blame games. Shifting blame and providing conflicting information only goes to exacerbate the crisis which is threatening lives and businesses across the country.