NDC government didn’t lose $3bn to Dumsor – John Jinapor
A former Deputy Power minister under Former President John Mahama’s administration, Mr John Jinapor, has debunked claims that the country lost about GH₵ 600 million in 2014 in economic activities under the then Mahama government.
He said President Akufo - Addo exaggerated the impact of the 2014 power crises under the erstwhile NDC government and that impression it created was false.
The President speaking at the National Policy Summit on Monday said Ghana lost about $3 billion in economic activities during the power crisis.
Citing a report by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), President Nana Addo added that the country lost about GH₵ 618 million in economic activities in 2014 alone which is equivalent to two percent of GDP.
But Mr Jinapor speaking on Accra Based Okay FM said, “By the end of 2015, we had resolved the deficit. In the whole of the year 2016, we never had any load shedding programme because we had enough capacity beyond our demand.”
He added that, “if we had any outage, it was a localized outage and so it couldn’t have been that in the four years of President Mahama, we had load shedding throughout. If you do the arithmetic, the President claims that in 2014 alone, we lost about GH₵600 million. If you multiply GH₵ 600 million by 4, you will certainly not get $3 billion and so we would like to interrogate that information and subject it to critical scrutiny” .
“The most important thing is that, by the time we left office, we had closed deficit and even with the low levels of the Akosombo dam, we had enough thermal complementation in order to ensure that we had adequate supply of power.” he stressed.
