Member of Parliament’s Mines and Energy Committee, Edward Bawa, is warning that the next government will inherit the energy sector challenges that the ruling government is pretending do not exist.
According to him, the energy sector is in debt and slowly deteriorating, as it cannot generate the requisite capacity needed to keep the lights on.
Speaking on JoyNews’ The Pulse on March 25, he said, “Let me state it without any shred of doubt that any government, whether it is another NPP government (God forbid), or it is John Mahama or another government coming into power in 2025, will walk straight into a power crisis.“
“The first reason is that the energy sector indebtedness is so frightening that even the IMF says that it is the single most dangerous sector that can crash our economy because of the level of debt.
“The second aspect of it is that because they were singing excess capacity, they have not added any generation into our mix. So, as we speak today, we have consumed almost all our capacity. Therefore, if we do not make a serious attempt to add capacity to our current capacity, we will run into capacity deficit,” he said.
The Bongo MP said that although the ruling government was aware of the generation deficit, they had constantly used their ability to keep the power on as a political tool. Therefore, they would not openly admit that there were challenges within the sector.
Over the past few months, pressure has been mounting on the Electricity Company of Ghana to release a schedule for the current power outages.
But on each occasion, the ECG has rejected these claims and attributed the load shedding to maintenance work or stated that during certain peak hours, the transformers were overloaded, resulting in load shedding.
However, the legislator insisted that this was sheer Public Relations (PR) gimmick to massage the situation and stressed that to understand the crisis in the energy sector, it is necessary to read the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission’s (PURC) validation report on the Energy Sector.
“They are so hypocritical, they are not truthful to the system. You see, they have run this particular sector, and this is just a microcosm of the bigger picture, they have run it based on PR rather than facts.
“I am saying that the truth of the matter, don’t take my word for it, take PURC for its word. PURC’s own orders that they have given to ECG is because of the fact that they have realised that the centrality of this problem is about cash flow,” he criticised.
ALSO READ: