"Arresting the dollar" and "Dumsor" - Should we take promises of politicians with a pinch of salt?

The Energy Minister, John Peter Amewu has assured Ghanaians that the country will not return to the dark days of dumsor under the watch of President Nana Akufo-Addo.

According to him, the recent challenges in the power sector are primarily due to technical issues.

Delivering a statement in Parliament on Friday, the Energy Minister said, the current challenge has nothing to do with financing.

“The Ministry of Energy is currently working with the Volta River Authority to come out with the best way of repowering the T3 Plant. We shall therefore revert to you on this issue at the appropriate time. On this issue, let me say that events that led to previous governments experiencing prolonged outage of power, popularly known as Dumsor will never ever be witnessed in this country,” he said.

Power to be normalized in about five days – Amewu

Parts of Ghana experienced outages twice this week.

The problem affected areas including Madina, Koforidua, Achimota, Kasoa, North Kaneshie, Cape Coast, parts of Takoradi and other parts of the country.

While taking a tour of the affected power infrastructure that led to the recent outages, Mr. Amewu said he hoped that the challenges will be rectified within the next five days.

“Definitely because of the construction work that is going on [at Pokuase] there is a need for them [companies in the power distribution chain] to halt the transmission of power for this period. So these are some of the problems they are facing. You can see the progress of work and my expectation is that it is going to be completed within about five days. But we’ve put in measures to minimize the impact. This is one of the major causes of interruptions. The problem has been caused by technical issues,” Amewu assured.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), Jonathan Amoako-Baah also assured that measures have been put in place to ensure consistent power supply within the next few days.

“There is enough stock for the generation stations to provide the electricity we need in Ghana. We are having these challenges and difficulties because of the project at Pokuase. There is no dumsor. When we finish this work, we are going to go back to the reliability of supply that we have been used to in the past. So Ghanaians I want you to be rest assured that in a few days when this work is completed we are going to go back to the status quo,” Mr. Amoako-Baah added.

Source: Citinewsroom