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2012 presidential candidate of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, has said the current energy crisis facing the country will not end anytime soon.

In Dr. Nduom’s estimation, it will take the country about four years to end the power crisis.

“If we start doing the right things today, it will take us four years to solve this power problem that we have,” he stated in a radio interview yesterday.

He added: “If somebody tells me that this power problem will be solved at the end of this year, I know he or she is not serious.”

Speaking to the host of Citi Breakfast Show (CBS), Bernard Koku Avle, the PPP leader who is also an entrepreneur, urged the Mahama administration not to camouflage the problem because of politics and be truthful with the people since energy is crucial for the development of the country.

President John Dramani Mahama has promised to end ‘Dumsor’ (power cuts) by the end of December 2015.

The crisis, which has persisted since 2012 due to generation shortfalls, has collapsed several jobs.

Currently the government has initiated a number of projects aimed at scaling up power generation to feed into the national grid.

But these in Dr. Nduom’s opinion will not solve the energy crisis now, but rather may provide a “temporary respite.”

The one-time energy minister under the erstwhile Kufuor government said it takes a minimum of two to three years to complete a long-term power project, to generate electricity.

After generation, comes transmission he stated, adding, from the look of things the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) which has the mandate to transmit power has a lot of work to do in order to put in place transmission lines.

Dr. Nduom continued that after the transmission lines have been erected, the next stage is how to distribute the power to ensure that it gets to the consumers.

The PPP leader, however pointed out that the current distribution infrastructure of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), the main power distributor, needs to be replaced and modernised since some of the equipment have been in use since the 1960s and 1970s, asserting that it takes billions of dollars to be able to replace the obsolete transformers and other electrical equipment.

“So if you produce one hundred times power but you don’t improve the means by which it gets to the people-the distribution side- well you haven’t solved the problem,” he stated.

According to Dr. Nduom, there is a blueprint detailing how to solve Ghana’s energy problem and stressed the need for the leaders of the country to work consistently with the plan which is already in place.

He indicated that as a former energy minister, he was not in favour of resorting to short term measures to solving power crisis and rather preferred that Ghanaians were told the truth about what needed to be done.

He stressed that the problem at hand needed solid and consistent measures to solve it.

Dr. Nduom pointed out that as an investor who has a factory in Elmina; the energy crisis was affecting his businesses since he could not operate at full capacity.

Though he admitted the crisis was a long standing one, he registered his resentment about the politicisation of the problem.

That, he explained, was the reason why he shunned directly from attacking the president but preferred that President Mahama came clean with the truth about the energy situation facing the country.

“I have said consistently that I am not going to stand anywhere and blast President John Mahama for not solving the problem today, I am only worried when he or anyone says that I am going to solve the problem this year or it will be solved next year because I know it is not possible,” he stated emphatically.

Earlier, Dr. Nduom indicated that the calls for a new voters register were misplaced, insisting that rather there should be calls for a robust national identification system.

According to him, clean elections begin with proper means of identifying who is a Ghanaian and eligible to vote.

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is leading the call for a new voters register for the 2016 general election.

The move, according to the NPP, will address the bloating of the register and ensure the credibility of the elections.

But Dr. Nduom argued that compiling a new voters register was the least of the tasks required to bring sanity into the electoral process.

“There is a national identification system as well as the National Identification Authority (NIA) in place which is supposed to produce and deliver national identification cards to people,” he stressed

He maintained that with technological advancement, it would not take years to implement such a credible system and that a new voters register was not the starting point in the quest to clean the electoral process.

He further contended that the focus should be on ensuring a national identification mechanism that works.

“Reconstructing or constructing a new register is not a huge task. But you cannot start from a new voters register; you must start from the national identification system,” he stated.

The 2012 PPP presidential candidate averred that what Ghana needs currently is a national identification system that will clearly determine “who is a Ghanaian and who is a Nigerian or American” and that the NIA is the only establishment that can determine a Ghanaian and a non-Ghanaian, stressing that the Electoral Commission (EC) has no such powers.

“The Electoral Commission does not have the mandate by law to decide who is a Ghanaian and who is not a Ghanaian,” he said.

He emphasised that “we already have the National Identification Law. That Act is there on the table [and] we must use it.”

According to him, with the national identification system even a baby could be registered as soon it was born and issued with the national ID cards which the child could carry so that when the child attains the voting age, he or she can walk to the EC and register in order to vote.

Dr. Nduom also advocated for continuous registration since the national identification system could provide a sound basis of identifying who is a Ghanaian and who is not a Ghanaian.

“So that you cut out all these other malpractices and other things that come in here and there,” he declared.

He pointed out that the developed countries adopted this system which eventually worked for them.