The Killer Power Crisis

We are compelled to revisit the power crisis as the government fails to bring palliative measures to address the issue, which is snuffing life out of the ordinary Ghanaian.

To say people are losing their lives because of what government rather prefers to call energy challenge is an understatement.

The lethargic approach adopted by the John Mahama administration in solving the worst energy crisis ever visited on the country is mindboggling.

In his 2013 State of the Nation address, President Mahama told Ghanaians that the energy crisis, or dumsor in the local parlance, was giving him sleepless nights.According to him, a series of unforeseen circumstances, including damage to the West African Gas Pipeline, had contributed to the poor energy situation in the countryand enumerated measures to address it.

But three years on, the problem is far from being resolved, causing irreparable damage to corporate Ghana. All the measures President Mahama highlighted to resolve the crisis came to naught, although he promised to fix the crisis instead of managing it in this year's State of the Nation address – meaning that, we are back to less than square one or ground zero.

No wonder nobody is minding Ghanaians any longer as they swallow the bitter pills the government has forced down their throats.

Now corporate Ghana cannot cope with the crisis any longer and the resultant effect is massive job cuts even ahead of the IMF prescription of 'rightsizing' of public sector workers.

Yesterday, Blue Skies, a British beverage producing company operating around the Nsawam axis, announced a one-third job cut of its 3,000 workforce, all because of dumsor, compounding the unemployment situation.

This company is not alone in this business of shedding workforce all because of the poor management of the energy crisis. Coca Cola and other businesses are also feeling the pinch, resulting in people losing their jobs.

According to the Ghana Employment Council – the umbrella body for private employers – over 12,000 workers were sacked from their jobs because of the energy crisis within the first three months of this year.

And with the crisis defying every solution prescribed by the authorities, we should brace up for more alarming figures as we await the December 2015 assurance by the new Power Minister, Dr Kwabena Donkor.

Until December, nobody should raise a whimper because after all, the government says December is the deadline, without quantifying the losses to the state in terms of revenue and social discomfort to families and society in general.

For how along are we going to follow this path of business as usual in solving major crisis facing the country like the current one which is causing serious social dislocations?

Families are breaking apart because of dumsor and loved ones are also losing their lives in hospitals and in fire outbreaks.

Like a demented hen that sucks its productive eggs, how long are we going to look on before everything runs aground as it is threatening to do presently, with the cost of doing business galloping like horses in a racing contest?

The damage caused may be too much to handle if we don't do something immediately to address the crisis which started since 2012.