Dumsor and the untold story of the Akosombo Dam

Friends, many thanks beyond words for your interest in my previous articles; I am exceedingly grateful.

The feedback I am getting indicates that a lot of my cherished readers found my English lessons useful, and I want to do something on punctuations this time around.

Even though punctuations are taught right from basic schools, it is an area that most people find difficult.

In punctuation, the three end marks are the period or full stop, question mark and exclamation mark. Whenever any of these marks are used, the next word must begin with a capital letter.

One other difficult area in punctuation is the use of the ellipsis marks (. . .) which show omission of one or more words from a quoted material. If the ellipsis occurs at the end of a sentence, four spaced dots are used instead of three; one is the period or the full stop for the sentence.

I trust this lesson has been useful too. Now kindly let me go to my main theme for this article. As I explicated in some of my previous articles, our first president, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah went through a lot in the hands of opposition elements when he was president.

Whoever thought that some full blooded Ghanaians could sabotage the construction of a national asset such as the Akosombo Dam? But it did happen! Please brace yourself for the bombshell.

In 1958, the story is told that the opposition having lost elections against Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP, Danquah and Busia travelled to the United States of America and informed the US President, General Dwight Eisenhower not to give any loan to Dr. Nkrumah to enable him construct the Akosombo Dam.

While the U.S. government would not give Ghana a loan of US$70 million, in 1958, to build the Akosombo Dam because of the alleged lies these gentlemen peddled against Nkrumah, it gave Taiwan US$81.6 million.

For four years, 1959-1962, America gave Taiwan a total of $471.7 million as grants. Imagine what Nkrumah would have done with that kind of money. But Danquah and Busia purportedly went and scuppered everything just because they were rejected by Ghanaians in three general elections.

Nkrumah’s original concept of an integrated industrial project was, therefore, curtailed. Later, the British government and Kaiser, a private aluminium company helped Nkrumah with only 35 million pounds which was added to Ghana’s own Internally Generated Funds to finally build the Akosombo Dam.

That is how unreasonable, inconsiderate and hoggish some people could be in their resolve for power. Yaanom, their descendants seem to be pursing the agenda of their ancestors.

After the construction of the Akosombo Dam much was not done to increase the power generating capacity of Ghana leading to Ghana’s historical challenge with stable electricity supply.

Ghana, therefore, recorded dumsor in 1984, 1997, 2006-2007, before the problem re-occured in 2012, as a result of a disruption of the West African Gas pipeline, which created a power generation deficit.

But this was comprehensively and effectively resolved by H.E. John Dramani Mahama before leaving office on January 7, 2017 through the following interventions: the procurement of 450 MW karpower and 250MW Ameri emergency power plants. He also completed the construction of Ghana Gas Company at Atuabo which has the capacity to handle over 300MW of thermal plants. Besides, President Mahama completed the 220MW Kpone thermal plant and others to increase the country’s generation capacity by over 800 Megawatts.

Unfortunately, dumsor is back under this Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government which is creating difficult conditions for households and businesses through sustained power outages as state power transmitter GRIDCo is reported to be shedding in excess of 450 megawatts of power daily.

Interestingly, government has not made any attempt to release "dumsor" timetable to help Ghanaians plan their activities which is worsening their already dire conditions. And many electrical gadgets are being damaged through these unplanned power outages.

That notwithstanding, as we continue to ponder over this critical situation, I wish to recommend someone who has been tried and tested; someone who is humble and God-fearing; someone who is sympathetic and a listener; someone who is visionary and a doer.

He is your loved one, H.E. John Dramani Mahama. Please do well to remember him on December 7, let’s help him to continue the good work he started.

Anthony Obeng Afrane