Is This an Efo Juju Kind of Innate Ghanaian Attitude?

No matter the comparative and/or relative degree with which or to which any diehard partisan politician or party functionary or apparatchik looks at this matter, there is absolutely no excuse for the sort of rhythmically or arrhythmically erratic intermittent darkness in which Ghanaians presently find themselves. Dumsor is a most objectionable state of accessing our most vital source of socioeconomic, political and technological development irrespective of whether such deplorable state of energy supply occurred under the John Dramani Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), or the present Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). The fact of the matter is that the lives of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens are being virulently disrupted and decidedly made ungovernable, not matter what the myopically self-defensive buck-passing likes of Mr. Fred Oware, the Bui Dam’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), would have the rest of us believe (See “Why Do You Lie to Ghanaians? – Allotey-Jacobs Blasts GRIDCo MD” Peace-FM / Ghanaweb.com 4/15/21).

Equally objectionable is this bizarre notion that, somehow, if Ghanaians had known, beforehand, that they would be suffering the grim ravages of the scourge of Dumsor, then they ought to have voted to retain the man who did just a diddly to absolutely nothing about this most basic technological prerequisite to our socioeconomic, cultural and industrial development. Here again, the glaring fact of the matter is that the kleptocratic leaders of the National Democratic Congress have no more inalienable constitutional right to the reckless endangerment of the lives of the Ghanaian electorate and citizenry than does the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party. Both political and ideological establishments have woefully failed the members of the Global Ghanaian Community (GGC) in ways that must not be glibly “relativized” in favor of one political establishment against another. Both major political establishments have epically failed Ghanaians and must squarely be envisaged as such. One wonders what Team Akufo-Addo had been doing all these past four years that our national energy crisis seemed to have been definitively resolved. We must also remember the lie peddled by the Mahama Posse that, somehow, the AMERI-Deal Scam-Artist had definitively resolved Dumsor before being seismically voted out of office.

In other words, the government had ample time within which to comprehensively assess this perennial problem and work out the most definitive solution or solutions. For example, Ghanaians and our political and civil society leaders have always known, at least since the very inception of our Fourth-Republican dispensation that the country’s exponentially increased population could not rely exclusively on the old hydroelectricity-generated mode or system of power supply, and that we needed to rapidly and massively diversify our means and sources of energy supply. In recent years, and I promptly stand to be corrected, we have tapped into the use of thermally generated power supply which was found to be far more expensive and less efficient. Thermal electricity was, by the way, what most Ghanaians with access to modern energy supply were using long before the construction of the globally renowned Akosombo Dam, and then the supplemental or complementary Kpong Dam, was added to our national power-supply grid by the remarkably progressive and, one could even aptly say, the visionary I K Acheampong-led junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC), subsequently renamed the Supreme Military Council (SMC-1).

I have said this before and hereby reiterate the same, once more, that until the yeomanly contributions of “Mr.” Ignatius Kutu Acheampong are duly recognized and celebrated in the annals of our national development as a people, our history as Ghanaians would not have been completely and truthfully told. As of this writing, I had read somewhere that the Akufo-Addo Administration had given the assurance that the current state of Dumsor would become a thing of the past in about a year. Some concerned citizens and critics have even demanded that the government roll out a clearly defined timetable for returning our nation to at least the “Dumsorless” or “Sor-Sor” regime of most of the last four years under Nana Akufo-Addo’s first governance tenure. I perfectly agree with this group of critics and national-development advocates and experts.

But we also need to equally bear in mind that no matter how intolerable the present power-supply crisis may be, even as Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, the country’s recently appointed Energy Minister, pointedly observed, the current situation is far much better than the dodgy state of “Let’s creatively work around Dumsor,” rather than frontally resolve this seismic level of existential disruption, that criminally prevailed under the anti-fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative watch of President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama. You see, with Nana Akufo-Addo, there is far more beyond the annoyance of Dumsor that meets the approbation and gratitude of the Ghanaian citizenry than the sheer inconveniencing implications of Dumsor and the abject lack of urgency in resolving the same that was more the norm than the aberration under the Akonfem-Kanazoe train wreck that was the Mahama-chaperoned regime of the National Democratic Congress.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 15, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]