We shouldn’t be seeing ‘dumsor’ now after heavy investments made by Mahama’s gov’t – IES

The Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Security (IES), Nana Amoasi VII, has expressed surprise about the country's recent erratic power outages (dumsor).

According to him, the country should not be experiencing dumsor now after the many investments made by the erstwhile John Dramani Mahama administration.

Speaking to TV3, Nana Amoasi VII bemoaned how debt in the power sector under the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has increased in the last few years leading to a crisis in the power sector.

“We shouldn’t be seeing ‘dumsor’ by now because of the kind of investment that was made in the sector by the previous government. It ensured that we don’t have any questions or issues about our capacity to generate.

“What was left was financing the fuel supply and by that, they also sought to clear the debts in the energy sector introducing ESLA in December 2015. ESLA was expected to generate 650 million dollars a year so in a space of five years, that legacy debt that sat in our chest of almost 2.7 million should have been cleared…but we sat aloof, we mishandled the ESLA and we still have the energy sector debt going up,” Nana Amoasi said.

The Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Security further warned that if care is not taken, Ghana’s power sector may collapse.

“For the power sector alone, if we should add the Forex losses, the idle capacity charges, and the fuel supply that has not been paid to the invoices raised for power sales to governments, it is over 2 billion dollars. Just for the power sector, we’ve not touched on the petroleum segments of the sector.

“So, we should be very careful with the way we’re handling the sector, one day it may collapse in our face,” Nana Amoasi VII cautioned.

Meanwhile, the recent erratic power outages have been attributed to some maintenance issues by the Electricity Company of Ghana.

The company has assured that it will be resolved in no time.