Blame Mahama’s government for ‘dumsor’ – Energy Ministry

The Energy Ministry has blamed the former Mahama administration for the return of the dreaded power crisis popularly called ‘Dumsor’.

Several parts of Accra and other places in the country had in recent weeks experienced severe power outages, triggering fears that the debilitating crisis that engulfed the country for over three years, resulting in collapse of Ghanaian businesses is gradually returning.

The current fluctuations in power supply come after the previous Mahama administration said it had fixed the crisis.

But speaking Tuesday February 28, 2017 in an interview with Francis Abban on Morning Starr, the Technical Adviser at the Ministry of Energy, Michael Opam said the claim by the former administration that it had fixed the challenges with the power sector is incorrect.

The previous administration, he said in its quest to solve the power challenges resorted to knee-jerk solutions.

“Unfortunately, I don’t want to apportion blames. Unfortunately, because of…I want to say delays in maintenance…if the TAPCO plant was available we wouldn’t have even resorted to Cote D’Ivoire.

“But we had delayed the maintenance of TAPCO to the extent that it was not possible to do it again otherwise that particular plant is gone. So in order to keep the lights going on we have resorted to still running the TAPCO plant when we shouldn’t have,” said Mr. Opam.

“So…you know…there are certain things that we have done which plunged into that situation and it was all because we wanted to keep the lights on,” he added.

According to the President, Nana Akufo-Addo in his maiden State of the Nation Address, the former administration bequeathed to his administration a heavily indebted energy sector.

Attempts by the previous administration to resolve the power crisis, he said on February 21 led to a gargantuan debt overhang in the sector, noting: “We have inherited a heavily indebted energy sector with the net debt reaching US$2.4bn as at December 2016.”