General Secretary for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Asiedu Nketia, has disclosed that there is a resurgence of sporadic power outages in the country and it is due to government’s negligence. According to him, the ‘dumsor’ incidence cannot be justified by the incumbent government.
His comment follows Energy Minister, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh’s assertion that transmission lines currently transporting electricity to the various substations were old. As such, works are underway to improve them leading to the outages.
“Dumsor has come and this one is because of the negligence of this government”.
That notwithstanding, Mr. Nketia urged Ghanaians to discredit their justification for the occurrence, by revealing that the “NPP is lying to Ghanaians.”
“If they are building new transmission lines, it has nothing to do with the existing transmission lines… so how does your building of a substations somewhere contribute to dumsor? It is after you have finished the new line or substation and you want to change over. And that will [not] take you more than a week to do.
“So, what is happening now is the breakdown of the existing systems when the new ones haven’t happened yet.”
NDC fears power outage will persist
Touching on efforts to improve the incessant power outages in the country, Mr. Nketia believes that the previous NDC administration, as far back as 2014, introduced frameworks to amend the crisis.
Recounting measures introduced, Mr. Nketia stated that some tariffs were adjusted upwards as part of the Millennium Development Compact. This was to offset the cost incurred while on a path to improved access to power supply.
He further revealed that the incumbent government took advantage of the tariff increment to discredit the NDC as insensitive to the plight of Ghanaians.
Thus, in April 2018, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission reduced electricity tariffs for residential, non-residential, mines and special load tariff customers.
This followed President Akufo-Addo’s proposed review of the tariff setting methodology and cost structure of the country’s energy production.
Commenting on this, Mr Asiedu Nketia revealed that the move has deepened the woes currently being suffered by Ghanaians. According to him, under the current administration, this has led to a loss of several critical facilities.
He explained that the challenges encountered at the time was due to inadequate financial muscle, fearing the worse could happen.
“Because they were taking the monies from the strength of the balance sheet but their incomes were reduced on the back of the tariff reductions. And so, nobody will give you the money so it didn’t come. The management came to declare that they have to stop all the capital projects.”
ECG proposes increment in electricity tariffs
On April 8, 2021, the Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana, Kwame Agyeman-Budu revealed that his outfit might increase electricity tariff. According to him, the Company needs more funds to support its operational activities.
Mr. Agyeman-Budu believes that it is critical for ECG to have access to more funds to enable it operate efficiently.
“We need money to [improve] it . If we get the increase, we will love it [but] that will be up to the PURC because, no matter what we propose, they will ultimately decide.”
“In terms of distribution, we need support, because we have to do upgrades to make sure the system is sustainable. We don’t wait till something is broken before we fix it. We need additional funds to upgrade our systems at all times”.
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