Ghana: Dumsor Returned With A Vengeance

That was when the national grid collapsed completely, comprehensively, leaving flummoxed citizens scratching their heads in dismay, wondering why, after almost seventy years of independence (next year), their country can't generate and distribute enough to power its domestic and paltry industrial base.

To find out what a gwan, I went to interview the Minister responsible for Power or lack of it.

Describing the Kasoa to Accra road as nightmarish is to be guilty of inadequate vocabulary. The condition of the country's most important transportation artery, which also serves as Ghana’s stretch of the ECOWAS highway, is better imagined than described. Some parts were so cratered that they resembled one of those militarily attrited countries in West Asia.

But that is a story for another day.
The Ministry of Power itself was in total darkness.

Bumping into furniture and walls, the security man who looked like a retired military man led us around until we found the Minister presiding over the Ministry of Power, receiving visitors by the generous light of three emergency Chinese lamps, two rechargeable lanterns from Aba in Nigeria, and what I can only describe as raw ancestral faith.

Outside his window, a chorus of generators roared away like a herd of asthmatic lions, each one a small monument to the private electrification of a public failure.

Fuel dealers, especially those selling diesel, were, no doubt, popping champagne somewhere. Or they would have, if they could keep the champagne cold. They would certainly also be laughing at their banks.

“Welcome,” the Minister said, his dark Ashanti face glowing warmly, as though welcoming me into a well-lit, functioning nation. “I hope your journey was comfortable.”

“Thank you, Mr. Minister. It would have been magnificent,” I told him, “had your ministry not taken it upon itself to remind an entire country what life was like before Thomas Edison had his famous idea. You people are failing citizens big time.”

He chuckled, the practiced chuckles we see in people who have weathered many such encounters and lived to collect their salaries regardless. “We prefer to call it a temporary interruption,” he beamed, revealing perfect dental work good enough to drive dentists out of business.

Ah, “temporary interruption,” the great euphemism. The sturdy workhorse of African official bureaucratese. The cousin to “administrative delay” and “ongoing investigation.” When a whole nation sits in darkness for a whole day, “interruption” is not an adequate noun. At that point, darkness has not interrupted anything. Darkness, at that scale, deserves its own ministerial portfolio, its own budget line, possibly its own seat at Cabinet, since it clearly governs more effectively than some of the people drawing salaries to prevent it.

“Sir, when the whole of Ghana sits in the dark for a whole day, calling that an interruption is an understatement.

He shifted in his seat the way a man shifts when the chair has suddenly grown teeth.

“You journalists exaggerate,” he said, beaming.

Do we now, Minister? What are we supposed to do when sixty-nine years of self-governing ourselves, our hospitals ran on generators. Businesses counted losses in real time. Welders, barbers, cold-store operators, and the poor soul trying to charge a phone to call his mother all discovered, yet again, that in this republic electricity is less a public utility and more a personal responsibility.

“The system experienced technical challenges,” he offered.

“Technical challenges, Minister! Humanity has photographed black holes. We have parked robots on Mars and had them take selfies. Surgeons operate on trembling human hearts using machines steadier than African Ministers’ promises. And yet, every few months, some corner of this continent must hold a solemn press conference to explain, with great seriousness, why a light bulb has once again declined to cooperate.

“It isn’t that simple,” he said.

“Of course it isn’t,” I said sarcastically. “Failure rarely is. Success is simple; failure requires paragraphs.”

He leaned forward. “You don’t understand the complexity of managing a national grid.”

“I understand something far more complex,” I said. “I understand how a nation raises its citizens to become world experts in excuse-appreciation instead of world experts in electricity.”

Silence filled the room more completely.
“Tell me honestly,” I pressed on. “When you go abroad and meet your counterparts from other nations, the ones whose lights stay on through hurricanes and blizzards without so much as a flicker, what do you tell them at dinner? Do you proudly announce Ghana’s efforts to battle the latest bout of Dumsor? Or do your counterparts, out of sheer diplomatic mercy, simply avoid the subject the way one avoids mentioning a drunk uncle’s dancing at a wedding?”

He frowned deeply. “We are making progress.”

I was not impressed. We are making progress is our Continental Anthem in Africa. Chiseled into our constitutions of excuses, right there next to “we inherited the problem” and “a committee has been established.” I have come to believe these three sentences alone could power the entire grid if only hot air were a recognized energy source. We would be exporting electricity to Europe by now.

“We inherited problems,” he tried.

“The second favorite,” I said.
“We have set up committees,” he said, almost on cue.

“The third,” I said. “Minister, I could write your press release from memory at this point, and I suspect so could you, in your sleep, possibly by candlelight.”

He sighed, the particular sigh of a man realizing the interview had gone rogue. “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

“I enjoy electricity more,” I said. “Sadly, one of us gets to enjoy his preference regularly.”

He reached for his water bottle, warm, no doubt, like everything else that day. “Development takes time.”

“Almost seventy years since independence,” I reminded him, “and our transformers still haven’t discovered patriotism? Nations flattened by war rebuilt entire industrial bases in a generation. Small desert nations turned sand into silicon valleys. We, meanwhile, gather solemnly around microphones to explain why refrigerators have been demoted to cupboards.”

“You make governance sound easy,” he said, wounded.

“No, Minister. I like it when public officials make accountability necessary.

Outside, another generator spluttered gamely to life, adding its voice to the choir.

I gestured toward the window. “Listen to that marvelous orchestra, Minister. Every generator has quietly become an adjunct to the Ministry of Energy. Every barber, welder, and internet café owner now budgets for diesel before profit. Citizens have privatized their survival mechanism and left the Ministry to handle the press conferences.”

“Our engineers are working tirelessly,” the Minister said tonelessly.

“Minister, I have no quarrel with your engineers,” I said. “My quarrel is with our political culture in Africa that applauds explanations more warmly than it demands solutions. Engineers only build what a system allows them to build and to maintain.”

His face hardened. “So what would you have us do?”

“Resign when you fail. As a matter of course. Not as scandal, as custom.”

The room went eerily quiet in a new way.
He laughed nervously. “That’s a rather foreign concept.”

“Exactly my point, Minister. Exactly my point.”

Elsewhere in the world, public office is treated as a public trust, surrendered the moment it is broken. Here, it sometimes resembles a hereditary chieftaincy. Success is eagerly claimed by the government of the day. At the same time, failure is generously attributed to the weather, “the previous administration,” global markets, climate change, and, on a slow news day, unnamed spiritual forces. Responsibility, curiously, never seems to find its way onto anyone’s letterhead.

“You’re being unfair,” the Minister lamented.

“Am I, Minister? Our ancestors mapped constellations, smelted iron, raised cities out of forest and organized kingdoms with breathtaking sophistication. They had no electricity, true, but they understood competence intimately. A blacksmith whose tools kept failing was not crowned Chief Blacksmith For Life. A hunter who returned empty-handed every single season was not promoted to Minister of Game Affairs. We have, somehow, misplaced that particular ancestral wisdom on our way to modernity.”

For the first time all afternoon, the Minister smiled, genuinely, involuntarily. “That was a good one.”

“I have more where that came from.”

“Go on, then.”
“If electricity has grown this unreliable, perhaps the Ministry itself should be renamed the Ministry of Hope. Hope, after all, requires no transmission lines, no substations, and, mercifully for your budget, no fuel.”

Even his secretary, eavesdropping shamelessly from the corridor, broke into laughter she quickly tried to disguise as a cough.

As I rose to leave, I left him with one last thought, free of charge, as is my custom: “Ghana, and Africa more broadly, does not suffer from a shortage of speeches. We are drowning in speeches. What we suffer from is a famine of execution. To make progress, we in Africa must retire the politics of excuse and rediscover the old civilization that prized competence above all else. Let our universities become workshops of invention rather than factories stamping out certificates. Let our engineers, not slogans, design our energy policy. The performance of our Minister of Power should be measured not by the eloquence of his press briefings, but by the number of uninterrupted nights a child can study by electric light.

Let us rediscover what our ancestors knew - honor follows competence, and leadership, real leadership, carries consequences.

Nations grow prosperous, quite simply, by switching on the lights and leaving them on.

The Minister said nothing.
©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com

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