Lack of cash cause of Ghana’s power crisis – Manteaw insists

The Chairman of the Civil Society Platform on Oil and Gas, Dr Stephen Manteaw has reiterated claims that the cause of the ongoing power crisis is government’s lack of money.

Ghana has for the past three years been face with power crisis due to challenges in power generation.

President Mahama  during the May Day celebration said that financial challenges was not the reason for the crisis.

But in an interview with Citi News, Dr Manteaw, who was recently in Turkey and Lebanon to assess the progress of work on the power barges being built by Karpowership challenged the president to come clear on the matter.

According to him, his interaction with officials of the power company building the barges proves that lack of funds cannot be ruled out.

He said “as I speak to you now, there is no financial closure on one of the barges that government is expecting from Turkey, there is financial closure on just one.”

He argued that “the agreement between Karpowership and Ghana, was signed in June 2014 and only it’s only about a week or two ago we were able to reach financial closure on one of the barges,” hence his position on the matter adding that “as I speak with you now we have not reached financial closure on the second barge, then this point to the fact that the problem we are facing has to do with lack of funds.”

Dr Manteaw also told Citi News that a World Bank report in 2013 warned Ghana about the power crisis.

“Way back in 2013 the World Bank put out a report which predicted the kind of crisis that we find ourselves as a country today. The World Bank said the challenges that Ghana faces in the electricity sector were largely due to lack of adequate and secured quantity of reasonable priced fuel for power generation and the lack of adequate public fund to finance the sectors investment requirement,” he said.

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By: Godwin Akweiteh Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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