The National Democratic Congress’ (NDC) parliamentary candidate for Damongo, Adam Mutawakilu, has attributed Ghana’s power challenges to a lack of generational capacity and liquidity lapses.
The government is burdened with an over GH¢2.3 billion debt owed to Independent Power Producers in Ghana (IPPs), with regular power cuts that have had Ghanaians agitated.
Speaking on The Big Issue on Citi FM/Citi TV on Saturday, March 16, 2024, the former Damongo member of parliament called on the government and its communicators to stop massaging the issues surrounding the power cuts.
He indicated that the government was not being truthful when it said the power cuts were due to overloaded transformers, which the Electricity Company of Ghana said it was working to restore.
“If you look at all these figures, you can come to the conclusion that the issue we have at stake is generational. The issue is about fuel. We don’t have fuel to power the plants and that tells you how visionless the Akufo-Addo-Bawumia government is. When we had ‘dumsor’ during Mahama’s regime, we put certain structures in place to ensure that we never encountered ‘dumsor.’
Adam Mutawakilu lauded former president John Dramani Mahama and said he had made the necessary investments to ensure that the power needs of the country were catered for which has unfortunately, been thwarted by the Akufo-Addo-led government.
“President Mahama made sure that we had enough plants. He brought on board new plants like Ameri and Karpower so that we had enough capacity to produce electricity. Again, he dealt with the fuel situation, which brought stability.
“If Mahama had not had the vision to develop the power sector, we would have been in a lot of problems and he saw the liquidity issues and brought the ESLA [Energy Sector Levy Act] to make sure that we cleared off all the outstanding debts and didn’t incur any debts to the IPPs in 2016.”
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