Dumsor: NPP lying to Ghanaians – Asiedu Nketia

Johnson Asiedu Nketia, the General Secretary of the opposition NDC, has stated that the current power outages or dumsor, and the explanations being offered by some NPP apologists flies in the face of logic.

According to him, what Ghanaians are experiencing is simply dumsor and the Akufo-Addo administration should solely take the blame because of its negligence.

“Dumsor has come and this one is because of the negligence of this government,” Asiedu Nketia said on Joy News in a report monitored by GhanaWeb on Sunday.

The NDC scribe further indicated that the justifications being offered by the engineers of Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) do not add up.

Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, Minister for Energy, has explained that the current power outages are due to improvement works from the old transmission lines to the substations.

The Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) had also stated that the construction works on the Pokuase and Kasoa substations with other infrastructure upgrades are expected to rectify the intermittent power outages.

But Johnson Asiedu Nketia says: “NPP is lying to Ghanaians.”

He explained, “If they are building new transmission lines, it has nothing to do with the existing transmission lines… So how does your building of substations somewhere contribute to dumsor? It is after you have finished the new line or substation and you want to change over. And that will take you more than a week to do.

So, what is happening now is the breakdown of the existing systems when the new ones haven’t happened yet.”

Asiedu Nketia averred further that the erstwhile NDC administration, as far back as 2014, foresaw this canker and instituted frameworks to ameliorate the crisis.

“As part of its measures, some tariffs were adjusted upwards as part of the Millennium Development Compact to offset the cost incurred while on a path to improve access to power supply,” he stated.

Asiedu Nketia added that the NPP rode to power in December 2016 on the back of this tariff while tagging the NDC as insensitive to the plight of the citizenry for taking that route.

Therefore, technically, the power supply companies, “were taking the monies from the strength of the balance sheet but their incomes [have now been] reduced on the back of the tariff reductions [by the Akufo-Addo administration]. The management [of the power companies, therefore] came to declare that they have to stop all the capital projects.”