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Opinions of Tuesday, 13 April 2021

Columnist: Abdul Razak Bawa

How Yaw Buaben Asamoa’s different kind of 'dumsor' spoilt my fridge

Former Member of Parliament for Adenta, Yaw Buaben Asamoa Former Member of Parliament for Adenta, Yaw Buaben Asamoa

Our elders have a saying that, if your mother is dead and you say she is sleeping, morning will expose you.

If something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it is definitely a duck. The government and its agents can continue tickling themselves and refusing to admit that, we are back to the days of load shedding, popularly known as 'Dumsor'. Ghanaians, who have lived through this period before, know what time it is.

Ghana, unfortunately since I was born, has been described as a developing nation, whatever parameters that accounted for that description, still exist; in fact we have taken the turn for the worst. Those tasked with the responsibility of managing the affairs of the country, can decide to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches and refuse to admit what is obvious to all.

This wash and rinse attitude that, we are being fed with is a far cry from what Ghanaians are experiencing and possibly expect in the coming days, weeks and months.

Silence, it is said is golden, in fact we are always reminded of how unique God created us, when in his infinite wisdom, he decided to give us two ears and a month, so we can listen more than talk.

The communications Director of the New Patriotic Party and a former Member of Parliament (MP), Yaw Buaben Asamoah, can no longer be characterized, because as things stand now, he does not have a character.

One would have thought after suffering a humiliating defeat at the polls, a man who belonged to the learned profession and by sound reasoning must be learned, would have learnt a lesson by now.

But Yaw Buaben Asamoah has not changed for the better; he is still the star actor of shame. He keeps pushing the boundaries of common sense, for his stomach.

It is no longer funny what Ghanaians are going through. The erratic power supply is not only having an impact on industry but domestic users as well.

Reliving the past is not only traumatic but disheartening, since we have been made to believe that Dumsor, has been solved.

The subtle admission by Yaw Buaben Asamoah that they is Dumsor and yet tried to justify it by claiming that theirs is a different kind of Dumsor, exposes the man of evolving in complexity.

Now to the meat of this piece! Speaking on JoyNews' Newsfile on Saturday April 3, Mr. Asamoa said, "This generation is different from the other generation. This second generation is a verb for a new situation which is an addition to the problems we were experiencing before; transmission challenges.

"So whatever is happening now, from my understanding, factually, is that we have adequate generation and we have increased consumption and that is putting pressure on our ability to transmit and distribute. So the infrastructure for transmission has come under extreme pressure."

He added that due to the challenges being faced by GRIDCo to efficiently transmit power, it could lead to large swathes of the country experiencing power cuts.

So the difference with the traditional dumsor where one transformer in the neighborhood trips and the neighborhood goes off and a trip on GRIDCO main line is that, that's a wholesale line and that means once it trips, a whole region could go off even if a particular part of that region wasn't the direct source of the trip. So we had the situation where one day the entire country went off.

"The key thing now is that you could suffer an outage almost innocently because you're on a wholesale line which is GRIDCO. So this is a more critical situation than before that we need to quickly upgrade transmission in order to stabilize the system."

This is what I describe as empty in content and pathetically ridiculous in context. It is nothing other than the disconnected excuse of an unfocussed mind.

Even a child born six years ago, knows what Dumsor is, he or she have lived through it and can tell today, when what we are expressing is nothing more than dumsor.

Lying comes naturally to Yaw Buaben Asamoah, he does it without regard to his conscience and the fear of God that is supposed to reside in him.

The same day, he made that ridiculous claim, I experienced Mr Asamoah's different kind of Dumsor, my light did not only go off, but it kept going on and off, in a disco light fashion.

The resultant effect of the madness is that, my fridge got spoilt, and I had to spend money to fix it, so please don't come and tell me, what we are experiencing is not what we have experienced before.

In all sincerity, gone should be those days when theses politicians throw anything at us and expect us to swallow, hook, line and sinker. We all live in the same country, and our experiences are the same.

The likes of Buaben Asamoah, take solace in the fact that, the memory of our people is short; indeed, too short! In other words, since we tend to forgive and forget the past so easily, it has become difficult for the sinners of, especially, our immediate past to either repent or be treated to the real wages of sin.

I hope, he will recall the kind of vituperations directed at the person of former president John Dramani Mahama, when he decided that cosmetic nature of tackling dumsor, had not paid off and so he took the bold decision, even at the risk f losing the 2016 election to end dumsor once and for all.

How was a government that didn't add a single megawatt to the national grid, be able to keep the lights on for four years, if not for the visionary leadership of their predecessor?

John Mahama, solved dumsor before handing over power to Akufo-Addo, it is obvious now that, even managing it is a problem for him. I am not surprised because properties bequeathed to him and his siblings by his father have been sold.

Some Ghanaians are dump and will believe everything that come out of the mouths of our politicians, but as long as some of us have brains, ears, eyes and can decipher things for ourselves, we can no longer be fooled.

As Abraham Lincoln puts it, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time