Private legal practitioner Mr Martin Kpebu is of the assertion that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will lose the upcoming polls should the government succumb to the demands of citizens and provide a load-shedding timetable.
The country has in the past few months been experiencing erratic power cuts, otherwise known as ‘dumsor’.
Though the power distribution company – Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) – has attributed the intermittent power supply disruptions to technical challenges, some Ghanaians and institutions including the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) think otherwise.
While the situation keeps aggravating, several organisations and individuals have entreated the government to release a load-shedding timetable for Ghanaians to plan their lives, but to no avail.
The hesitation from the government allows Mr Kpebu to assert that the ruling party’s victory in the next election is dependent on the current energy sector crisis.
“By this time, the dumsor timetable should have been out but see how they are doing rocket science, shifting blame. ECG saying they don’t get enough notice from GRIDCo so it’s impossible to get a timetable. Then you find Matthew Opoku Prempeh come to insult us after we paid him with our taxes. He even has not gotten the courtesy to render an unqualified apology to us.
“So what they are saying is that if this time table comes out, they are sinking themselves because election 2024 is just around the corner,” he said on TV3’s The Key Points.
Meanwhile, Senior Political Science lecturer at the University of Ghana, Dr. Kwame Asah-Asante, has expressed his belief that the recent intermittent power outages will have an impact on the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the upcoming 2024 general elections.
He noted that energy issues are one of the factors voters consider when deciding which candidate or party to support.
Dr. Asah-Asante recalled that intermittent power outages during former President John Dramani Mahama’s tenure played a significant role in his electoral defeat, as the then-opposition NPP capitalized on it as a campaign issue.
“The elections that took Mahama home were fought on the basis of dumsor. This party [NPP] took advantage of that and drummed into the ears of Ghanaians and it formed part of the calculations or contributions that Ghanaians made in deciding who to vote for.
“Remember the dumsor economy which Dr. Bawumia made noise about which was legitimate at the time and the same legitimacy can be brought to bear on the current dumsor which the government is pretending doesn’t exist.”