Executive Director for Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye has charged the government to come up with sustainable ways to rid the country of intermittent power outages.
His comments follow the uncertainty of the sector minister, Matthew Opoku Prempeh on whether or not there will be an extension of the power outage schedule.
The ongoing loading shedding exercise by the Electricity Company of Ghana in parts of Accra ended on May 18, 2021 as scheduled.
The eight-day power outage schedule was to enable ECG undertake some maintenance works on the Pokuase and Kasoa Bulk Supply Point.
Responding to the sector minister’s remarks, Executive Director for Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye told Citi Business News, the minister should as a matter of urgency communicate concrete solutions to the problem at hand.
“You (the Government) needed to get people to know what is happening currently and what the situation is and the timelines for resolving some critical projects that are ongoing. I think the understanding we got from the last communication was that this load shedding that we had from last week was going to help fix the problem around Pokuase and its environs.”
“So, if after that period you have a challenge for completing the project you just need to communicate but to just leave it blank and not give us any assurance or the timelines of delivering on that commitment was not well-received. I thought you could have told the public what really the challenge is going forward and how you intend to resolve it”, he said.
Mr. Boakye further urged government to focus on effectively distributing the power and recovering the revenue to run the sector and largely prevent a strain on the country’s budget.
“We’re also interested in some specific action that targeted resolving a key challenge in the energy sector as we know like issues of debt accumulation and the problems with distribution which makes it difficult for the value chain to pay. That is what the cracks of the issue really is, we’re not able to sell power, recover the revenue and pay the value, so we consistently have government coming in to pay money from the resource that could have gone into other development areas or taxing the people more to be able to resuscitate the energy sector. And these are very crucial issues that we have to address as quickly as possible not to further endanger the budget of Ghana”, he added.