Lack of funds cause of dumsor - Owuraku Aidoo

A member of the Mines and Energy Committee, William Owuraku Aidoo, has attributed the re-emergence of the power crisis to a lack of funds by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government to purchase crude oil to power thermal plants in the country.

Despite several promises by ministers of state and the president himself, ‘dumsor’ (power outages) has persisted some five years after it began.

This prompted concerns from the populace leading to President Mahama declaring that it was too early to announce a load shedding regime as happened during the peak of the crisis, which saw many people losing their jobs as a result.

But speaking to Class News, Mr. Owuraku Aidoo said the mismanagement of the economy by the NDC government had led to a return of the crisis.

“We have a problem, we are struggling to procure light crude oil to power our generators. We are relying solely on Safari [Group Limited] to supply us with light crude oil. Not to mention N-Gas. N-Gas has not supplied Ghana Gas for many weeks.

The failure of Safari to deliver on the appointed date is what has brought us into this but we shouldn’t forget that if government had really done proper house cleaning as far as the economy is concerned and everything was on point, there are lots of crude oil on the high seas.

If you have money, you can get light crude oil to purchase with a snap of the finger, but because we are not in the position to purchase and rely solely on Safari, that is why we have ended up in the situation that we are in, shedding close to 240MW of power every day,” he told parliamentary correspondent Ekow Annan.

“…I did mention sometime back that the problem with dumsor is purely a matter of money and that is what has come back to haunt us.

If you have money, procuring light crude oil is not a problem. But because our economy is in bad shape, we are not able to raise the needed funds to procure the light crude oil, relying solely on Safari, so anytime Safari is unable to deliver, and then we end up in the situation that we are in.

So, I never thought that dumsor was ever over, we just had a respite and unfortunately dumsor has come back.”