'I said yes you call me ‘Mr. Dumsor’; I took responsibility and fixed it and added 3,000 megawatts' – Mahama

Former President John Dramani Mahama has said he accepted responsibility for the power crisis that confronted the country during his time in office.

He said though he inherited the power crisis he took responsibility and fixed it.

Speaking in an interview on Ugandan-based NBS television. Mr Mahama said: “We had the Akosombo Dam. We thought Akosombo will last forever, unfortunately, it didn’t. So we were consuming like 2,600 megawatts and our production was 2,300 megawatts so we had to go through a period of outages. What did I do? I took responsibility.

“I didn’t blame previous governments. I said yes you call me ‘Mr. Dumsor’…I inherited this problem but I take responsibility because you voted me into power to take responsibility and fix things and so I said I’m going to fix this and by 2015 I had added an additional almost 3,000 megawatts to Ghana’s generation.”

According to the former President, the initiative by his government to put in excess generation paid off, otherwise, the country would have been plunged into another power crisis before now.

“I was actually accused of putting in an excess generation…more generation than we needed. We are consuming 2,600 megawatts. Today we are consuming 1000 megawatts more and so if I didn’t put in that excess generation we probably would have started having an energy crisis again and it’s beginning to happen.

“Outages every day because the consumption has caught up the amount of energy that is available and we are beginning to have problems,” Mr Mahama emphasised.