John Jinapor, Ranking Member on Parliament’s Mines and Energy Committee
John Jinapor, Ranking Member on Parliament’s Mines and Energy Committee has stated that if the government does not act swiftly in settling the Independent Power Producers, there may be a massive load shedding.
According to him, this is due to the government’s indebtedness to the power producers.
His comments come after the Independent Power Producers gave the government a June 30 deadline to settle their debts else, they would shut down their plants.
Government owes the IPPs up to $1.4 billion of which it was seeking to restructure some after the country’s debts became unsustainable.
He said on JoyNews on June 21 2023: “My fear is that eventually, we might get to a situation where all the IPPs will shut down and when they shut down, we are going to have a massive load shedding.”
John Jinapor also noted that the government’s failure to settle the power producers sends a wrong signal to the international market and could lead to further downgrades.
“Ghana will no longer be considered as creditworthy and nobody would want to do business with Ghana because the sovereign itself has defaulted and the World Bank guarantee itself is being called upon,” he said.
John Jinapor said the government is to be blamed for any crisis that looms.
This is because: “First of all, they themselves set up what they call the energy sector recovery programme in 2019. They were specific, if you read the document, this year, that programme was supposed to come to an end. The year is ending and yet they have achieved virtually nothing.
“In addition to that, the Minister of Finance came to Parliament in that year 2019 and requested 1 billion dollars in order to achieve this objective.
“We approved that money for the Minister of Finance, he got the money from the EuroBond and misapplied the money. He did not apply that money to the intended purpose, and for the purpose for which he came to Parliament,” he stated.
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