Minority proposes solution to Dumsor

The Member of Parliament for Yapei Kusawgu who is also the ranking member on the Energy and Mines Committee, Honourable John Abdullai Jinapor has outlined 10 major points which he claim will guide Nana Addo's government to take a stop to the current intermittent power supply in the Country.

Addressing the Parliamentary press corps today in parliament, he indicated that, the Minority in Parliament has taken cognisance of the current erratic and unreliable power supply coupled with the lack of sincerity on the part of Government officials and handlers of the power sector, "to our commitment towards ensuring reliable and uninterrupted supply of power proposed the following 10 points recommendation for Implementation."

10 points recommendation

1. The Energy sector players must be proactive and inform (Publish a schedule) electricity consumers. 

2. Government must cut down on wasteful expenditure and Inject the much-needed capital into the power sector. 

3. Government must desist from political interference in the management of the Energy sector.

4. Government and its communicators must desist from engaging in the propaganda on excess capacity and come out with a formula for absorbing capacity charges as part of operating cost.

5. Power sector managers must ensure that they pursue Long term planning to ensure fuel security for generating assets at the least cost possible.

6. Government must allow Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to take the responsibility for their fuel supply requirements.

7. Immediate steps must be taken to aggressively address ECG’s spiralling technical and commercial losses currently estimated by its worker unions at 34%                                                                 
8. The Ministry of Energy must conduct a comprehensive reconciliation of the total indebtedness of all players including government and its SOEs including (GNPC, GNGC, VRA, GRIDCo, CENIT, ECG, NEDCo) in a transparent manner. 

9.The Ministry of finance must take steps to utilize the $1 billion sovereign bond borrowed in 2020 to address the financial challenges of the Energy sector.

10. Government must ensure that Energy sector SOEs Publish details of their financial statements including details and ageing of their indebtedness as well as debts owed to them on time

The former deputy minister for Power further elaborated that, the current power outages is due to financial problem.

Mr Jinapo's submission comes on the back of the recent report from the Auditor-General which revealed about ¢230 million debt owed the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo).

He noted that since the beginning of the year,GRIDCO alone has given six different reasons for the major national outages aside the intermittent localised blackouts, with the most ridiculous reason being attributed to trees falling on high tension.

According to him, the ECG which recorded a profit of over 500 million cedis under President Mahama in 2016 has posted cumulative loses over 4 billion Cedis since the 2017 financial year.

He stated that the GRIDCO which also posted profit in 2016 has equally taken a turn for the worst with total comprehensive loss of over 600 million cedis as captured in their 2018 financial statement. Due the worsening financial position of GRIDCO, Agence Francaise de Development has had to withhold funding for a major upgrade of national transmission line for over 2 years culminating in congestion of the GRID.