The Resurrection Of Dumsor

There are a few number of economic challenges even the finest economists cannot foresee, but the resurrection of dumsor was practically predicted by almost every enlightened Ghanaian. It is not rocket science! You only need a modicum of common sense to do that. Why? We live in a developing country where national development planning is virtually non-existent, hence producing our seemingly chronic energy problem.

So no one dares blame John Dramani Mahama, the incumbent president, for our perennial power outages. In fact, the root cause is poor economic planning at the governmental level in recent decades. However, I cannot gainsay the fact that the present government has actually compounded our energy crisis over the years.

Moreover, I have always maintained that "energy is the skeleton of the body of a country." And just like a human skeleton, energy provides support, movement and protection for the body of a country, which is the economic environment. As a nation's economy grows, expands, develops and/or advances, its energy needs definitely soar. That is why it behoves any planning oriented country to meet its increasing power demand through a comprehensive economic plan. This is what my dear country Ghana, the acclaimed gateway to Africa, has failed to carry out successfully. Okay, are Ghana's energy needs on steep increase? Yes. And does Ghana have a true national development plan to meet them? No.

No wonder the state's subtly apathetic attitude towards our energy sector has culminated in the resurrection of dumsor. Forget the technical and political gimmicks by both the power providers and the executive arm of government, we all know the rise of a probably dead dumsor is really a development planning issue. Ghanaian businesses are collapsing and the resilient ones are struggling to survive permanently. Households have been left befuddled due to erratic electricity supply. Indeed, it is not surprising that Ghana continues to lag behind Eastern and Western countries in global economic competitiveness.

Besides, I have some kind of hope since pragmatic measures have been taken by the government to ease our load-shedding, in the short term. The general public too have a civic responsibility to help curb our power crisis at the moment. We ought to conserve electricity in our homes even though it is not free but we pay for it.

Alternative power sources like renewable energy such as solar and wind power should be patronised by people. And I wish large organisations in Ghana, foreign or indigenous, would budget for the use of biomass as time goes by. Well, these are short to medium term strategies. In the long term, Ghana needs to start developing an all-inclusive national development plan which will span one or two decades.

Source: sirarticle.blogspot.com