Former Energy Minister under the John Mahama administration, Emmanuel Armah Kofi-Buah, has criticized the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) for being a significant contributor to the country’s power sector challenges.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express on Monday, March 4, the Ellembele MP specifically mentioned ECG as the weakest link in the energy sector value chain, which includes production, transmission, and distribution.
In recent times, parts of Ghana have experienced unstable power supply, although ECG, the national power distributor, has stated that it is not implementing any load shedding requiring a timetable.
However, many power consumers believe that the country is experiencing a return to the severe power outages known as “dumsor” experienced in previous years.
ECG has attributed the intermittent power outages to major maintenance issues, overload on transformers, and localized underground cable faults, among other factors.
Responding to a question about the power situation in the country on PM Express, the former Energy Minister under John Mahama, Armah Kofi-Buah, said, “ECG is the weakest link in the value chain. It’s the biggest headache in the energy sector and it’s a fact.”
If you recall, what causes dumsor [power outages] is not always one thing. It could be a generational shortfall, the issue of fuel and financial challenges in getting some of these things done. As we speak, the reason we don’t have a generational shortfall and say that we don’t have dumsor [power outages] in terms of the generational shortfall, is that the MD of ECG rushes to buy heavy fuel oil for AKSA. The only reason why AKSA is operating is that ECG bought AKSA heavy fuel oil to operate. Sometimes amid a crisis we rush, and there are bigger issues that are confronting us” he argued.
During the show, Mr. Samuel Dubik Mahama, the Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), attributed the recent power cuts to maintenance issues. He clarified that the company only distributes the electricity that is made available to them.
“What we are experiencing now is caused by a lot of overload. A lot of transformers have a lot of customers on them more than what we have prescribed. Apart from underground cable faults within some localities, some of the power plants also undergo maintenance.”
He assured that the recent challenges causing the outages have been resolved.