It is no longer a political joke, if it had been one anyway. We mean the lingering power outages or dumsor, the new entry in Ghanaian English.
It has been two months or so since Deputy Speaker of Parliament Barton-Odro passed his drab and infamous remark about dumsor. He said that those who are failing to keep their businesses afloat for lack of the necessary acumen to do so should not attribute their situation to the power outages.
Having suffered so much since then, such victims of the dumsor who have suffered even more devastating fallouts from the energy crisis would not be able to contain further insults from the Barton-Odros should he decide on more of such nonsense.
Today many more businesses have collapsed and more are following suit, being unable to contain the restive economic times unleashed by the energy crisis.
The media, being part of the business community in telling their stories, would not agree that others surpass them in terms of tribulations they are suffering at this time.
It has never been so nasty and telling: keeping our heads above the parapet is an arduous task. Many failed to sustain their positions, having folded up in response to the energy crisis and other factors related to inefficient management of the economy.
While those in the electronic media recently put out how much they are losing, the print could only smile, considering how much the cost of diesel has augmented their production costs alongside the rising cost of other inputs.
With the power rationing timetable no longer reliable as if it had ever been, we in the Daily Gu are mostly dependant on our generator sets every day for power to sustain production.
Sometimes we wonder whether others share our ordeal: the Nima Police Station traffic lights share our plight. Anytime they are off – and they are mostly off – we too are off and the cost for being in such situations can only be imagined. Calculate the cost of two drums of diesel daily for a week, save Saturday, and you would understand the augmented cost of production that the energy crisis has unleashed on us.
With the temporary halt of the Cedi’s decline now reversed, the national currency has resumed its depreciation once more. This means more money is needed to clear printing inputs from the port where duties are calculated based on the prevailing exchange rates.
The private sector, especially the media segment, has been pushed to the wall by the energy crisis in an unprecedented manner.
With the cost of production approaching rooftop and cost of newspapers and advertisement rates at a constant, it would not be exaggeratory to describe media operations as suffocating under the current energy crisis. We appreciate the conditions which have informed the decision by some companies to prune their staff strength: it is all about responding to the realities of the times.
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