Outspoken Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong, has charged the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), to stop the excuses and solve the recent erratic power outages in the country.
He said the Akufo-Addo government has been able to stabilize the country’s electricity for the past two years, and thus has no excuse to blame the Mahama administration.
“To say it is a financial challenge, is no excuse. We have to solve the problem because it was part of our campaign promises, and we’ve been able to stabilize it for two years, so however we did it, we have to continue to sustain it. There is no excuse for us”he insisted.
Some Ghanaians are livid over recent power outages in parts of the country especially in Accra within the last few weeks. Whereas critics including members of the opposition National Democratic Congress claim the outages have everything to do with financial challenges, government communicators argue otherwise.
To them, the outages have to do with technical challenges which they claim have been solved.
But the Minister of Energy at a press conference on Monday conceded that financial constraint is partly to blame for the recent woes.
“Our major challenge has been the incomplete reverse flow project to flow gas from the West to the East. We had to fast-track it through a by-pass which has been completed, but not connected to the West African Gas Pipeline yet. This is because WAGPA has not come out with the tariff for the reverse flow, and WAPCO will not sign the Gas Transportation Agreement (GTA) without a tariff. WAPCO wants to charge US $3.2 MMBtu, whilst we want to pay US$1 MMBtu.”
Speaking on Adom TV, Kennedy Agyapong said the NPP government must do everything possible to stop the return of ‘dumsor’ to save them from embarrassment.
“We have to be straightforward, honest and sincere to Ghanaians and tell them that this is the challenge, and we are going to solve it. My question is that, if you criticize NDC in 2016, as politicians and government, we have to line up all the failures of NDC and what we condemned, and take them one by one and solve them. That makes you a better government. But if you also come and the same problem you condemned to win election, you can’t solve it, then even the technical people will even say politicians are not to be believed” he added.
The Executive Director of the Africa Center for Energy Policy, ACEP, Ben Boakye, has explained that the country’s current energy challenges resulting in a frequent power outage is due to the sector’s high indebtedness.
Speaking on Citi TV’s Point of View, Ben Boakye indicated that, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) was the most indebted agency within the sector with a debt of almost Ghc1 billion as of July 2018.
“We have to address the fundamental cause. The power sector is on steroids because we haven’t stopped creating the debts. If you check ECG’s operation for 2018, documents I’ve sighted showed that first quarter of 2018, they made a loss of almost Ghc1 billion. If they are making losses, they are not able to pay. and if they are unable to pay then the generator will have to call on the one who owns the contract that is government and government will have to get money come and pay. So if we don’t solve that problem then we’ll have to use our taxes at a point to pay the generators.
Source: Citi News
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