Who Switched Ghana Off?

Millions of Ghana Cedis was yesterday dissipated by intermittent power outages that hit half of the country from early morning. Valuable items including fridges (notably at the La suburb of Accra and Awoshie), computers and other office equipment were reported damaged by frequent power fluctuations in the national capital, the cities of Tema, Sekondi-Takoradi and Kumasi.

Tamale and the already deprived northern part of the country were neither spared the nightmarish experience that halted production and destroyed property. Within the space of two hours around mid-afternoon, consumers at Kokomlemle, Adabraka, New Town, Makola and other suburbs of the Central Business District were rocked by eight power outages in rapid succession, despite earlier assurances by the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) that the problem had been rectified.

Public Relations Officer of GRIDCo, Albert Quainoo asserted, while talking to The Heritage newspaper yesterday, that the sporadic power outages were caused by a serious fire outbreak which resulted in a blast into pieces of one of their equipment at Tema. He said the blast created a swing in the transmitter system and therefore, “we lost all the three lines from Tema To Achimota and the two lines from our substations to the Tema Township.” According to him, because the company lost the three lines, three generating units went out at Aboadze in Takoradi. “We had to work to restore the system around 11:00am”.

On the origin of the fire outbreak that resulted in the outages, the PRO said “we have no idea of the cause of the fire. The Heritage newspaper had to resort to calling up GRIDCo because the entity that sell power to consumers, the Electricity Company of Ghana, had blatantly shrugged off responsibility on interrogations on radio early yesterday. Other E.C.G sources had intoned that the producer, the Volta River Authority, was facing huge challenges in making available enough power, as the chief source, the Volta Lake, had lost some water and the thermal sources of power were dwindling. To a cross-section of the cursing consuming public that the paper interviewed, neither the ECG, VRA nor GRIDCo should escape blame. “They are killing us” was the consumer’s common refrain.