A leading member of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Charles Wreko Brobbey, has laughed off excuses that the Akufo-Addo government has been giving for the current spell of intermittent power outages across the country, saying the country has already been flung into an energy crisis.
In an interview with Accra-based Joy FM, Dr. Brobbey who is popularly called Tarzan said the outages only indicate that Ghana is entering another spell of debilitating power outages derogatorily referred to as ‘dumsor’ (on and off).
“…some of the problems we are having now, people want to ascribe it to technical problems but they are the beginnings of dumsor because of the failure of the available capacity to meet the demand,” he said.
About the Akufo-Addo government’s excuses, he said, “If somebody says he is going to change the big power lines in the middle of the rainy season, you will laugh,” he told the Joy News reporter.
“Some of the excuses are not tenable. People have sat down doing nothing and sadly, available capacity has caught up with demand, the quicker we do something about it, the better.”
An energy expert, Tarzan has formerly headed the Volta River Authority (VRA) which is the state company responsible for generating electricity for Ghana.
The recent talk about the return of dumsor is against the background of the Akufo-Addo government receiving a report from a technical committee it tasked in 2020 to investigate Ghana’s power situation.
The committee is said to have told the government that there is the need to increase capacity or add on extra power generation because demand is now outstripping supply.
Such recommendation is to the shame of the government because the erstwhile Mahama government had had many independent power producers producing for the country so that Ghana had even surplus power by the time the government was leaving power.
However after Akufo-Addo took over, his government started abrogating the contracts of some of the independent power producers, claiming the deals with them led to excess capacity that the new government was not happy paying for because they did not know what to do with it.
Interestingly, at the time the Akufo-Addo government was saying the country had excess capacity many places in the country did not have electricity – there still are many such communities.
Currently, there are fears of a possible return to dumsor following the demand by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) for a 148% increase in electricity tariff.
According to Dr. Wrecko Brobbey, “if capacity is inadequate, you have to generate and invest in more capacity. Power capacity does not take a day, so you have to plan. So, I hope that those in power now are actually looking at things and planning for the new demand.”