Gov’t lacks commitment to end power crisis – Joseph Adda

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) government has been accused of lacking commitment needed to end the power crisis the country is currently saddled with.

A former Energy Minister in the Kufuor Administration, Joseph Kofi Adda stated that the government has woefully failed Ghanaians because according to him, Ghana should “never have been in this situation in the first place...government has failed us miserably.”

He added that if the NDC government had followed through with projects initiated by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) “and what he Kufuor government had planned, we should never have been in this situation.”

The one-time Energy Minister recalled saying, “the generation capacity is something that we didn’t have enough of and we planned for that to be augmented. Then secondly, the fuel that we needed to be able to fire these plants to ensure that we have constant supply of power is something that government had to commit to but we are paying for either light crude oil or for gas; or if these two were made available, diesel will be used to fire some temporary plants to get us off a certain situation. All these things have not been followed at all.”

He therefore concluded that government “is not committed at all” and accused them of being full of “deceit, they lack commitment, there is some incompetence in there and of course there is a lot of corruption.”

Mr. Adda questioned if the stakeholders in the Energy sector were “going to be waiting for this gas infrastructure to come on stream and provide us with gas that we need today or tomorrow or in the long term to be able to fire the plants?”

He warned that if the energy crisis is not tackled “carefully and sincerely, and seriously, we will never get out of this situation.”

In a sharp rebuttal, a former Deputy Energy Minister and now Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Inusah Fuseini stated that Mr. Adda’s comments suggest he is suffering from “some form of amnesia.”

According to him, “it is commitment and greater commitment that the NDC government has shown that is why the project of producing power by the first quarter or the middle quarter of this year. It is commitment because the initial amount of $158 million that they brought into this country could not complete the project.”

“It is commitment that the work at the Bui power plant was not up to five percent; they had not done work u to five percent of the initial construction; it is NDC that took the project and run with it. That is a show of commitment.”

Alhaji Fuseini further described as unfortunate that all the efforts being made by government “have been jeopardized by the distraction of the pipeline [West African Gas Pipeline.]”