'Stadium Blackout Was No Sabotage'

THE FIVE-Member Committee formed to investigate the floodlights failure at the Baba Yara Stadium in Kumasi during the Ghana/Lesotho game says there is no evidence that the disaster was planned by some people to shame the country.

Presenting an eight-point summary of their report, the Committee Chairman Alexander Daary, the BNI Boss in the Ashanti Region, said 'there was no evidence of sabotage'.

The committee was formed by the Ashanti Regional Minister, Dr. Kwaku Agyeman Mensah, to investigate the floodlights failure and make recommendations to forestall future occurrence.

Mr. Daary continued by saying, 'However, there was a lapse on the part of those who attended the stakeholders meeting for not discussing alternative power supply arrangements at the stadium.'

According to him, though the floodlights functioned at a point in the first half of the game before going off, 'the 1000 KVA generator powering the floodlights failed as a result of a problem with the feed pumps'.

The BNI Boss observed also that switching supply from the generator to the national grid via the Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) could not be effected because the manual and automatic modes had both been disabled by the senior electrical engineer of Consar Ltd during the installation.

He said the technical staff stationed at the Baba Yara stadium did not have adequate technical capacity to manage the generator sets and control panel facilities so they could not operate the ATS, stressing that it took the ingenuity of the ECG technical team to detect the disablement of the ATS and to restore power supply to the floodlights.

The full details of the committee's observations and recommendations were sealed in a big brown envelope, and given to the Ashanti Regional Minister who promised to speak to the media later on about the whole report of the committee.

FROM I.F. Joe Awuah Jnr., Kumasi