Mutawakilu criticizes government over Ghana's power crises

Adam Mutawakilu, the National Democratic Congress'(NDC) parliamentary hopeful for Damongo, has identified the root cause of Ghana's persistent power challenges, pointing to deficiencies in generational capacity and financial obligations.

According to Mutawakilu, Ghana's power sector is burdened with a debt exceeding GH¢2.3 billion owed to Independent Power Producers (IPPs), exacerbating the recurrent power outages that have left citizens frustrated.



Read full article/> Rejecting the government's explanation attributing the outages to overloaded transformers, Mutawakilu urged officials to address the real issues rather than resorting to misleading explanations.

Speaking on Citi TV, he stated, "If you look at all these figures, you can come to the conclusion that the issue we have at stake is generational. The issue is about fuel. We don’t have fuel to power the plants and that tells you how visionless the Akufo-Addo-Bawumia government is. When we had ‘dumsor’ during Mahama’s regime, we put certain structures in place to ensure that we never encountered ‘dumsor.’"

According to Mutawakilu, the current administration lacks the foresight demonstrated by former President John Dramani Mahama, who made strategic investments in the power sector to bolster the country's capacity and stability.

"President Mahama made sure that we had enough plants. He brought on board new plants like Ameri and Karpower so that we had enough capacity to produce electricity. Again, he dealt with the fuel situation, which brought stability."

Mutawakilu also highlighted Mahama's efforts to address financial constraints in the power sector through initiatives like the Energy Sector Levy Act (ESLA), which aimed to clear outstanding debts and prevent further indebtedness to IPPs.