The Chief Executive Officer of the Africa Energy Consortium, Mr. Kwame Jantuah has called for immediate and urgent financial investment into the country’s energy sector to forestall power challenges.
His call follows the announcement by the Energy Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, that parts of the country will experience systematic power cuts in May as concerns continue to heighten over the energy situation in the country.
Speaking in an interview, the former PIAC Vice-Chair said the government must be candid with the ordinary Ghanaian in demanding citizens to pay more for power to enable the state to invest properly in the sector. Also,
“The question that needs to be asked is, do we have the wherewithal to invest in our power sector? Do we need to look at the entire situation again? I think we’ve gotten to the stage where we need to come full square to the Ghanaian and tell the Ghanaian, the way this sector is going if we do not get cash injection in there, it can create problems that can collapse the industry.
“And so, we have to brace ourselves to be ready to pay more. That’s the way I see it, let’s call a spade a spade.”
Kwame Jantuah
The Minister of Energy during a visit to the GRIDCo project site intimated that, the outages and the upgrade;which is ongoing has nothing to do with finances of GRIDCo or the energy sector.
Read more: Energy Minister appeals to Ghanaians to forbear the ongoing GRIDCo maintenance works
Energy sector challenge is financial
However, Mr Jantuah noted that the challenges the energy sector is going through has got to do with money. This comment contradicts the Energy Minister’s and also debunk claims that the energy challenge has to do with power generation and has nothing to do with finances.
“The power sector is not a sector you play with, it’s not a cheap sector. You need investment, it needs continuous maintenance of the equipment, both distribution and transmission, and even on the generation side. We are lucky we have quite a site of gas in our oil fields. But when you look at the other sides, the distribution and the transmission what we need is the money.”
Kwame Jantuah
The nation has over the weeks experienced frequent power outages which has raised numerous concerns as to whether the energy sector is facing power supply challenges or the nation is going back to its power shortage days. But authorities have assured that, that is not the issue.
However, Mr Jantuah also disagreed with the notion that the country is not back to Dumsor. According to him also, as far as lights are not staying on, the issue of power outage was back. africa energy
“When we had what you described, were the lights on or off? The lights were off. What is happening today? The lights are off. If you are looking at it in terms of duration and it’s being experienced throughout the country. So, I beg to differ if anybody says this is not Dumsor.”
Kwame Jantuah
