Ghanaian Politicians Never Learn – as Ghana Plunges into Darkness

Energy Minister, Dr Joe Oteng-Adjei, was quoted on a Joy FM news item on Tuesday, April 3, 2012 as saying, “by 2015, Ghanaians will realize that the government truly understands the power crisis” – to wit, it will take the government three years to understand how Ghanaians are feeling about actions of the little girl in the master control room of the Volta River Authority (VRA) who turns the lights on and off at her whim!

After listening to the minister’s interview, there’s no need boring readers with details of his empty political mantra. It is clear that the current government only made noise and rode on the gullibility of voters to come to power, as they have so far shown that they are simply clueless.

It was the same energy minister who, when it was discovered that the so-called Jubilee Field partners did not install metering devices on the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility at Cape Three Points allowing the partners to load crude oil without the use of modern measuring flow meters, said that dipsticks were being used as a temporary measure!

If a minister of state in the 55-year-old (greed) dependent Ghana would say that dipsticks and measuring tapes were enough to measure the quantity of crude oil being loaded onto vessels for export on vital installations such as Ghana’s first commercial crude oil production facility then, it is no news if the minister says that the recent needless power crisis has no end in sight.

The power crisis is nothing new. My memory tells me that we had some killer power cuts in between 1981 and 1983. Again, Ghana witnessed one of the worse crises sometime in 1998, a situation that turned Binatone rechargeable lanterns into treasure items in the country. And it looks like the last one we would experience would be the 2008 load shedding, which actually turned the nation into a simulated apocalypse! The power situation then was so bad that in the usual African knee jerk, lack of thought and shortsightedness, the Kufuor government went to town to purchase some diesel-powered generating sets, some of which cannot be switched on till today. Those power generating sets were nicknamed toy machines by Charles Yves Wereko- Brobbey, who helped mess up the VRA and was later made the Judas of the Ghana@50 booze party!

Indeed, in 2008 like today, the country was plunged into darkness on almost a daily basis. Other measures the Kufuor government embarked on included contracting a religious sect in Nigeria, called the Olumba Olumba Church to retrofit some old and defective transformers. The then government also claimed that they were going to import power from Nigeria’s electricity grid – note that in Nigeria, the lights go off almost every hour, and their power grid runs on a completely different system. Hence, the power import promise from Nigeria, a country where the power producer has become so clueless so much so that the citizens have nicknamed it Never Expect Power Again (NEPA), was pure trash.

Let’s get back to Oteng-Adjei and his clueless team members. The NDC, then in opposition, latched onto the power crisis, demanded answers of the then minister of energy, Joseph Kofi Adda, who came across in many of his propositions as completely bereft of ideas on finding solutions to the crises. During the NPP era, the electricity crisis was just one of the problems. The other simply amazing one was the shortage of gasoline and other refined petroleum products at the pump, a situation that resulted in winding queues all over the country. Well, I believe the NPP government paid for its crimes!

Having been in government before, it’s just amazing how the NDC government seems to be bungling everything. It looks as if many sectors of the economy are being manned by foundation scholars.

But anytime people complain drab statistics and empty but sometimes crazy answers are thrown out. Just before the energy minister came out to issue his outlandish promise to the suffering people, his deputy, Inusah Fuseini, the man who talks aggressively as though he was a sergeant major in World War II in East Germany, also came out to say that since assuming power, the government has been adding “150 megawatts to the national grid every year”. That story must be told to the marines!

What do the people gain in complaining about power cuts if the lights are on? If you have been adding 150 megawatts to the national grid every year since assuming power, by now, national generating capacity should have gone up by at least 450 megawatts. That would definitely ease the regular nationwide blackouts.

Sometimes when our ministers talk, they make a total joke of education. The other time when the entire nation was plunged into total darkness, a government appointee simply said that a tree had fallen on a cable from the Ivory Coast, resulting in complete systems failure! If that government appointee was in Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore, he would have been singing a different song – well, the other side is that he might not have risen to that position at all!

Africa is just an amazingly interesting place. During Obasanjo’s years in power, I was in Nigeria on an official trip.

Due to the regular power cuts, my expensive hotel room carpet was always wet, leaving a rather unwelcome stench in my suite. On a nice evening as I was going out, I asked my driver who was a very religious man what the government was doing about the power crisis. He told me that some power generating plants had been imported and were on the high seas coming!

Obasanjo continued with the damage to Nigeria’s economy and after a failed attempt to run for a third term in office, handed over power to Musa Yar’adua, a former lecturer who despite his deteriorating health, was selected by the corrupt Nigerian system to continue from where his mentor left off. In fact, I went back during the late Yar’dua years and the situation had not only worsened but had reached monumental proportions. As we write even umbrella or tabletop mobile phone battery recharge points have their own power generating plants.

The same driver who drove me around on my first trip was on hand to chauffeur me. Wanting to test his pulse, I asked whether the power plants had arrived. He simply exclaimed, “Oga, the generators still dey high seas dey come” – to wit, the power plants were still on their way on the high seas headed for Nigeria! That is a taste of the African story!

Before I digress totally, Dr Oteng-Adjei and his people have shown by word and deed that even when it comes to the simplest of tasks, they take forever to complete. Take the Tema Motorway street lights project for example. They have been in power for three years and three months. They have only managed to fix between the Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout and the Trasacco Valley (or let’s say up to the Tema Abattoir area). The most dangerous area, the Ashaiman to the Tema Roundabout portion has been left undone. And the good news here is that even some of the parts of the completed sections are never lit in the night, courtesy the Oteng-Adjei girl at the master control room of the VRA. Note that this street lighting project also falls partly within Oteng-Adjei’s energy ministry!

Oteng-Adjei, you guys have to fix the power problem or you pay for it. This power crisis was one of the main reasons why people voted against your predecessors the NPP. Why would you be repeating the same mistakes and expect people to vote for you? Fixing the power crisis is no space science. Maybe one of the main reasons why we are still in darkness 55 years after independence is that there are too many tie wearing engineers all over the place and also that the ‘damaging’ directors are not appointed based on their managerial acumen, but rather because their turns have come for them to also get a share of the cake!

Before I rest my case, please note that collapsing the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) or is it claiming that you are privatizing it is not going to serve your interest! If you have not learnt anything from those guys who sold Ghana Telecom to the imperialists simply to pay salaries, just go ahead and keep playing the chess game with the TOR.

In the meantime, please note that as for me and my family, we don’t expect to have power in our home. Anytime I get home and the lights are on, I am surprised, because I expect the lights to be off. This posture is simply because in Ghana everything is reliably unreliable!

Source: Kojo Owusu-Mbire Email: owusumbire@gmail.com