Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu has urged government to be transparent with Ghanaians on the current power situation.
According to him, government ought to be “candid” with the people about the state of the economy.
His comments follow ensuing power outages and the Energy Minister’s insistence on the situation being as a result of ongoing works.
Speaking in an interview, he noted that, the ‘dumsor’ experienced by Ghanaians will be damaging to businesses and the private sector.
“Energy security and energy efficiency are critical, not just for individual lives but its impact on the corporate world and the private sector can be depilating if we are not able to avoid another ‘dumsor’.
“But what government needs to do, is to be candid. They should speak with some fidelity that this is the state of affairs and this is how we intend to walk edges and paths of an imminent and unavoidable energy crisis”.
Dumsor under NDC
Touching on power crisis under the NDC administration, Mr. Iddrisu stressed that, they worked hard to fix the issue.
He further explained that, they did their best in “increasing the excess generation capacity” of the country.
That notwithstanding, he emphasized the need for the current administration to be transparent with Ghanaians. Additionally, he noted that Ghanaians deserve the truth on current energy crisis.
“It appears what is warranting this problem may be a different issue altogether. In one breadth are we to believe that the effect of problems with transmission or are we also to believe that independent power producers are not being paid paid adequately; or they are not getting enough good tariffs to justify the production?
“Government must speak with clarity”.
“Whatever it is, it’s disappointing that we’ll be subjecting the country into yet again one energy crisis”.
Economy is broke
The Tamale South MP further averred that, adding this to COVID can “only be increasing the burden of Ghanaians”. With this, one can only “conclude that we should look ahead to deteriorating quality of life”.
“It appears to me that the Nana Addo government in its second term take-off is greeted with some political headwind that nobody seems to understand. Nothing seems to be going on in the country, businesses are not functional, service providers and contractors that have done work for government are not being paid, no explanations are being given”.
Commenting on the current state of the economy, Mr. Iddrisu revealed that the “economy is simply broke and they should accept it”.
“Nana Addo Dankwa is simply surviving on the [wings] of COVID. If you think the country is not broke, why will Moody’s will downgrade Ghana. Why are we moving from middle income to low income. Why is government hiding, borrowing numbers from the Bank of Ghana, that in 2016 did zero percent financing for government. This year, we are having reports of between 22 to 29 billion of Bank of Ghana financing government. That is not acceptable for good economic management”.
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