It’s Official: Dumsor Has Returned As Parliament Directs ECG TO Publish Timetable

After months of denial that the nationally dreaded spell of power outages, derogatorily called ‘dumsor’ has returned, the Akufo-Addo government has been constrained to admit same, after its entanglement in its own web of lies complicated matters.

The admission came through the Electricity Company of Ghana, which in a meeting with the Parliamentary Select Committee on Mines and Energy on Sunday, made a clean breast of things and came under a direct order from the MPs to publish a timetable.

In the coming days therefore, the current dreadful situation where the electricity switches on and off with the rascality of disco lights will not go away, but will probably intensify. However, at least ECG’s expected loadshedding timetable will help citizens cope better with the return of dumsor.

Inadequate generation

After Sunday’s meeting with ECG,  Chairman of the Energy Committee of Parliament, Samuel Atta Akyea, told journalists ECG admitted that the power outages are resultant of the fact that the country’s generation capacity has mellowed.

“The conversations we’ve had so far are very good, some of the technical challenges relating to fuel and the rest of it may be tackled. If there’s under generation, which there’s an admission there’s one, we should do everything in our power to make sure that we generate enough power.”

“I think the Committee was very strong on the matter that if there are power outages, those who are enjoying should know when it’ll be available, and then they plan their lives around the timetable they’ll furnish them.”

“They are going to do it and we’ll do everything in our power to monitor them.”

The admission that Ghana is back in dumsor and that the return is due to poor generation puts into sharp highlight, the arrogance of Energy Minister, Mathew Opoku Prempeh.

Recently, when Ghanaians called for the publication of the same dumsor timetable that ECG has agreed to publish, this Energy Minister arrogantly told Ghanaians they could go ahead and publish their own timetables.

But Napo’s arrogance is the smallest of insulting ironies that the return of dumsor under the Akufo-Addo, Bawumia government, offends Ghanaians with. From a wider perspective, it shows how the current government has been recklessly incompetent in the handling of electricity, lifeblood of trade, of the economy.

Retrogression

The ECG’s revelation that it is unable to satisfactorily distribute energy because there is just not enough generation capacity, speaks to backward progress that the current government has made in the matter of the country’s electricity resources.

Before the John Mahama government would be voted out of office in 2016, it had signed Power Purchase Agreements with a number of independent power producers (IPPs) and those arrangements had led to a situation where Ghana had enough generated capacity for its own needs and even excess to export.

However, after the Akufo-Addo government came  into office, it abrogated a number of the PPAs with the excuse that they resulted in excess capacity that the government did not know what to do with.

In fact, the crude manner that the government went about the abrogation resulted in law suit, some of which resulted in judgment debts. The 2018 abrogation of the contract of Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) resulted in a whopping judgment debt of US$170million.

In 2022, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, justified the abrogation nonetheless, claiming that it had saved the country US$13.7billion in cost it would have incurred.

Just two years after, ECG is admitting Ghana is back to dumsor because the country does not have enough generation capacity.