Editorial: Is the load-shedding truly over?

Last week, Ghana's energy crisis made it into, arguably the word's most influential newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. The $5bn WSJ is a paper that countries would pay $1m to be positively featured in.

It is read by the fund managers who control trillions of dollars of money floating around stock markets across the globe. It is read by other investors in industries. It is essentially read by the corporate leaders of the capitalist world.

But, the introductory words of the article that appeared on Ghana said it all: "Just as its economy is picking up steam, Ghana is finding its growth stunted by a force beyond its control: climate change."

Though many scientists suspect that global warming is responsible for decreased rainfall, Ghanaians are not convinced that global warming is really the major cause of our crisis.

And, it is for this reason that the issue of global warming has not featured that prominently in the year-long discourse over the load-shedding.

This, nevertheless, is not to discount the World Bank estimate that global warming is a major reason rainfall in the Niger River Basin to the east of the Volta has decreased by 15% since the early 1970s, and officials at the international development agency suspect the effect has been similar here in the Volta River Basin, which includes parts of Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo.

The predominant sentiment in Ghana was aptly captured by the head of Research, Databank Financial Services Ltd, Daniel Ogbamey-Tetteh "From where we stand as a nation, I think we could have done better in terms of planning ahead and making alternative sources of energy available."

As it is becoming unbelievably refreshingly plausible, it seems President Kufuor has been very unfairly lambasted for rubbishing opposition threats if load-shedding did not come to an end by September.

Over the last few days, lights have stayed on way beyond the rationing Ghanaians have become accustomed to. And, this has been done without any notice.

So, it is tempting to suspect that it’s all the work of an irresponsible person who has ignored his duty to operate the control switches! But if indeed, the load-shedding period is over, then the President was absolutely right to say the opposition cannot do anything to him after September.

It seems the offs have been reduced from every other day to five days. This week, a team of nuclear scientists are in town from Vienna.

The International Atomic Energy Agency experts are in town to ascertain the viability of Ghana going nuclear. What the IAEA does is to seek to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Already it sees Ghana as being miles ahead in the region when it comes to expertise in the nuclear field. Already we have become a regional centre for training nuclear scientists.

This means that it may not be too far-fetched as most of our compatriots thought some few months back for our nation to add nuclear to our energy mix. Databank estimates that the outages are forcing companies to spend $62 million a month, or about $744 million a year, on extra power generation, or about 6% of the country’s entire economic output.

Databank are not alone in forecasting that power shortage will prevent the economy from meeting its growth targets for 2007.

Though this power crisis comes as the biggest test of Kufuor’s second term, we believe Ghanaians are willing to forgive the NPP. But only if Government will ensure that it does not remain a recurrent problem.

This crisis should end that 8-10 year cyclical crisis. After all if your economy has grown from $4 billion to about $13 billion in seven years you can expect that to impact on your energy consumption too.

The load-shedding may not be truly over, but it is certainly getting better. If to make it even better, or to even sustain the respite we are getting now, it means increasing tariffs, then please let us have it now. We cannot pretend to be alright when the consequences of pretending are far too severe for all.