Residents of Gumani, a suburb of Tamale in the Northern Region, are urgently seeking assistance as a prolonged power outage stretches into its ninth day.
The blackout has severely impacted daily life, forcing many to sleep outside, vulnerable to mosquito bites and other hardships.
Local businesses have also been hit hard. Tailors, for instance, have been compelled to relocate their operations to their homes to continue serving customers ahead of the upcoming Eid celebrations.
Drink sellers, who depend on electricity to keep their businesses running, are struggling to maintain their livelihoods.
In their desperation, residents are appealing to the government and the media for intervention to alleviate their suffering.
“Gumani is a waterlogged area, we are suffering, mosquitoes everywhere. Those who use the light to work are suffering. Our local businesswomen who do this local drink are suffering too, everything has gone bad because it’s when you sell you get something to feed your children and without electricity, you can’t do anything with it. So, we are pleading with the government and the media to help us so that this problem will be solved,” a resident speaking to Channel One News said.
The Assemblyman for the Gumani/Nyanshegu electoral area, Osama Mohammed assured residents that the problem is being addressed by the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo).
He explained that, the outage resulted from an overloaded transformer, which has since been replaced.
However, the new transformer’s capacity is insufficient, and NEDCo is working to install an additional transformer to fully resolve the issue.
“They told us the transformer is damaged, so they’ll work on it for us. Yesterday they changed our transformer, and the capacity is not up to the old one, so they said they are to add another transformer.
“So, after finishing yesterday’s own, there was a merge that caused the problem, so they traced the merge and told us today they’ll come and correct the issue and solve the problem once and for all,” he said.
Mr Mohammed expressed optimism that the issue would be resolved by the end of the day.
READ ALSO: