Former president and 2024 flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Mahama has urged the government to acknowledge the prevalent power outages, locally known as ‘dumsor’, and provide a transparent load-shedding timetable to consumers.
Amidst recent electricity disruptions across the country, Mr Mahama stressed the importance of transparency in addressing the issue. The government through the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has refused to call the outages “dumsor” insisting they’ve been caused by maintenance issues and occasional fault.
Speaking to a gathering in Sissala West as part of his “Building the Ghana We Want” tour in the Upper West region, Mr Mahama stated that Ghanaians are well aware of the ongoing power challenges and require a clear load shedding timetable to be able to plan their lives.
Drawing from his experience as a former president, Mr Mahama noted that he maintained transparency with the public by informing citizens about challenges and the measures taken to mitigate them.
Expressing concern, Mr Mahama highlighted the perceived lack of transparency from the current administration in addressing the power crisis.
“When I was president, if things were not going well, I told the people of Ghana things are not going well and this is what we are trying to do about it. I think my honesty was one of my major problems because I didn’t think I should fool my people. Today, every day you sleep and the lights go off and we know that they are shedding load. They have a problem with generation. Some generation assets are down. They have a problem with paying for gas.
“They have a problem with paying for fuel so every day they are shedding between 280 and 480 megawatts of power but they will not give us a timetable and say you will be off today, this one will be off tomorrow because that is what Ghanaians know as dumsor.”
“And so, we will just put off the light anytime and reduce the number of megawatts so the system won’t go down. But we don’t call it dumsor and so there is no dumsor but we know that it is dumsor,” he stated.
Source: Ernest K. Arhinful
