The Minority in Parliament is demanding that government allows the Electricity Company of Ghana and other public sector power distributors publish a load shedding time table that the government has forced them to shelve.
Communicating the demand, the Minority issued a 24-hour ultimatum for the schedule to be published or they hold a vote of censure against Energy Minister, John Peter Amewu.
Former Deputy Energy Minister and MP for Yapei Kusawgu, John Jinapor explains that the power distributing companies have been forced to ration power because of the government’s lack of contingency plan to fill in the gap as the gas pipeline supplying gas to thermal plants in Tema were shut down for cleaning.
And in a bid to cover up the incompetence, the government has forced the power distributing companies to shelve a load shedding time-table that they had prepared for the public, so that Ghanaians will go through the power rationing without knowing it.
“What we are saying is simple, we are shedding load, just give us a time table so that we can plan our lives around it, why should this be difficult?” Mr. Jinapor asked rhetorically.
According to him, as part of government’s obscurantism around the matter, the Energy Ministry has also been telling lies to cover up the true reasons for the load shedding.
Deputy Energy Minister in Charge of Power, William Owuraku-Adu, finally buckled under public pressure after weeks of government’s denial that it is shedding load without explaining the reason for the many power outages around the country.
The gas pipeline from Nigeria which supplies the thermal plants in Tema has had to go through maintenance, technically known as “peaking.” The “peaking” he claims has been completed and so the power supply will stabilize by the first week in March.
“The pipeline from Nigeria to Ghana which supplies gas to mainly, the Tema enclave, that he was clean out, what we call “peaking”….That was announced to the good people of this country and we told Ghanaians that there might well be some interruptions. We did take steps to try and reduce to the barest minimum, the interruptions in the power supply,” the deputy minister stated.
However, Hon. John Jinapor has dismissed the Deputy Minister’s claims as not being wholly true. “The true cause is that we do not have fuel, most of the thermal plants in the East, that is is Tema, KT, TPP, KT1PP, TT1PP TT2PP. Most of the thermal plants in the East are dual-fuel plants and so in the absence of gas, you can convert them to use light crude oil. Unfortunately, since January 2019 this government and VRA have not been able to procure any light crude oil, and so we don’t have that reserve in terms of fuel redundancy in order to power the plants in the event of a major disruption. So we knew, clearly, it’s an issue of fuel.