Member of Parliament’s Energy Committee, Edward Bawa, has indicated has explained the eminence of power crisis irrespective of which party secures power from the 2024 polls.
He says despite the monies taken by government to settle the debts bedeviling the energy sector, the cost has rather quadrupled instead of being retired.
“Irrespective of which government comes to power after the 2024 elections, they are going to run into energy crisis,” he said on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, March 16, 2024.
The Member of Parliament for Bongo, referring to former sector Minister, Boakye Agyarko, noted the legacy debt of US$2.4billion should have been settled by now.
He, however, indicated that the money which was supposed to be used to support the ECG to settle the debt was used for the Power Distribution Company (PDS) which collapsed as a result of “greed, corruption and nepotism.”
He explains to Alfred Ocansey that Ghana shouldn’t be experiencing this situation if not for poor management in the sector.
“When Boakye Agyarko came, he indicated clearly that the total indebtedness of the energy sector, which we call the legacy debt was US$2.4billion. And when they say the energy sector it is not just the power subsector, so the debt owed by BOST, the debt that was owed by TOR, the debt that was owed by Ghana Gas, all put together was the $2.4billion.
“The instrument that had been created to retard this indebtedness, in fact there was a two-point approach to it, the first approach was that; we had a legacy debt that we needed to refence and retire. We needed to also stop the hummerite; the continuous piling of new debts. These were the two problems that we were facing. Then the issue of the energy sector levy act that was promulgated. Based on our projections, in five years, the money that we were going to realise from the energy sector levy would retire 2.4 billion,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the sub-committee Chair of Dr. Bawumia’s campaign team, Kwadwo Nsafoa Poku has assured that the intermittent power outages otherwise known as ‘dumsor’ will be resolved by next week.
“…As at last night, the President was up so late and as early as 2am, they were crossing the Ts and dotting the Is. So, by next week, latest two weeks, the power crisis will be over,” he was confident.
Kwadwo Poku, who is also an energy expert speaking on same show indicated that the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has been shedding load as a result of high load in some areas during the peak hours of power consumption.
He explained why it is erroneous for Ghanaians to term the challenge as dumsor since Ghanaians’ description of dumsor is different from that of the politician who would want to score political points out of the situation.
As an ordinary Ghanaian would consider dumsor as his/her power experiencing a challenge and being resolved, Kwadwo Poku says the politician takes it as lack of enough capacity to power the plants to provide power for the state, which is likely to cost the government in power as election approaches.
He reassured the citizenry to keep calm and expect things to be resolved in the shortest possible time.
“I can assure you; we will not enter the month of April with this problem,” he indicated.
The ECG has said over 600 transformers have been overloaded across the country and are being changed.
