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A former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, has criticised the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) for its poor handling of the electricity crisis that has befallen the country. Nana Konadu, who has been quiet in recent times, believes government�s abhorrence to criticisms has to a large extent contributed to the worsening of the problem which Ghanaians have been grappling with for the last couple of months. She said the supply of electricity had become so epileptic that in a day, the lights go off for more than four times while the large chunk of the country slept in darkness. Like many other Ghanaians, Mrs Rawlings related that she had no option but to bear the harsh brunt of what had come to be known and accepted as �dumso dumso� (intermittent power outages) since �I live in a place where the lights go off like four, five times in a week�. Speaking to Accra-based Citi FM from the Central African Republic, Mrs Rawlings, who is also the President of the 31st December Women�s Movement (DWM), noted, �We have reached an era in our developmental programme as a nation that when one wants to criticise something or you want to make a critique of an issue that is actually creating a problem for the society, you have people coming out to actually banter you until you stop talking.� She stressed that the country was being led astray by its managers and called for general and constructive criticism among the leaders and the citizenry, insisting that the energy crisis would have been resolved if government and its agents had listened to constructive criticisms from well-meaning Ghanaians. This, according to her, was in view of the fact that if �we don�t need criticisms in our country then nobody is going to do the right thing.� Apart from that, the former strong woman in the NDC, who is now the leader of the breakaway National Democratic Party (NDP), indicated that the country could only move forward �when there is good and positive criticism levelled at those who are leading us�. She, therefore, stressed the need for a collective approach in resolving the electricity crisis that had beset the nation. Women Empowerment She took the opportunity to appeal to Ghanaians to change their mindsets about issues concerning women empowerment as the world celebrated International Women�s Day yesterday. �This is because when a woman is empowered, the whole community and nation becomes empowered,� she noted, whilst asking men to provide their female counterparts the needed support to achieve this. �What we are saying is that we cannot be empowering women alone without 49 percent of our men being on board. If the mindset of people towards women is not changed, we can�t achieve that. Therefore, we need the men on board to understand why there is the need to empower women,� she emphasised. She further stated, �It must begin with the empowerment of young men so that as they grow, they would know that they have been empowered enough to accept the capacity and the ability of the women and their importance to the society.� This, she said, was because �when a woman is empowered the whole community and nation as a whole, becomes empowered�.