Business24 Editorial: Power outages counterproductive

Over the past few months, Ghanaians have experienced irregular power supply. While some of the outages are scheduled, others are mostly unannounced catching consumers unawares mostly are rather odd times.

These power cuts bear semblance to what transpired during the peak of the load shedding era some five years ago prompting fears whether the country is indeed back to the dark days.

Authorities have resisted assertions that the country has run into a power crisis that requires the proverbial time-table that will advertise a formal load shedding programme.

The authorities have sought refuge in the excuse that these intermittent and frequent power cuts occur as a result of ongoing construction works on certain key power projects in the capital.

It has also become the norm for authorities to attribute some of these unannounced power cuts to maintenance works or sudden failure of key power installations.

The excuses anytime the power goes out have become one too many. There is no denying that the country’s power sector is under considerable amount of pressure.

The power transmission side has not seen any significant investment bar the investment being made by the Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) under its Compact II initiative.

There is also the distribution challenge one of the reasons for which the ill-fated Power Distribution Services (PDS) was engaged. Since their exit, not much has been done to deal with the problem.

Of course, there is the almighty cost of power produced by the independent power producers. Government is locked in these agreements and almost cash strapped in making good its commitments leading to debt accumulation for power produced.

This paper believes that all these challenges have persisted for a while and government cannot play innocent if not much was done in the past to prevent them from coming to a head.

The last thing that this economy needs after the debilitating effects caused by the pandemic is power cuts – be it announced or unannounced. For many SMEs that survived the pandemic, this would provide the final nail!