Former Deputy Power Minister, John Jinapor says figures put out by President Akufo-Addo regarding the energy sector are false.
President Akufo-Addo stated that the nation lost $3 billion during the power crises last year.
The President quoted the figures from the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER).
He further disclosed that the country lost about GHC 618 million in economic activities in 2014, adding that the figure is "equivalent to 2 percent of GDP".
President stressed that the power crises under the erstwhile Mahama administration which cost the nation 3 billion dollars also resulted in thousands of Ghanaians losing their jobs.
Reacting to the issue, Hon. Jinapor noted that the report by the President is misleading because the previous government put pragmatic measures in place to curb the energy challenge.
He said the Mahama government ensure that there was no load shedding by the end of 2015.
He also noted that Ghana didn't lose over GHC 600 million in 2014 as reported by President Akufo-Addo.
He asked the President to get his facts straight.
“The point is that when I was Deputy Minister, from 2013, 2014 by the end of 2015 we resolved the deficit. In the whole of the year 2016, we never had any load shedding programme, because we had enough capacity beyond our demand.
“If we had any outage it was a localized outage. And so it couldn’t have been that in the four years of President Mahama, we had load shedding throughout. The other issue is that, if you do the arithmetic, the President claims that in 2014 alone, we lost about 600 million. If you multiply 600 million by four, you certainly not get 3 billion and so we will like to interrogate that information subject to critical scrutiny,” he told Accra-based Citi FM.
<<Print>>