The President's handling of power crisis is a failure – Minority

The Minority in Parliament says the president’s poor handling of the energy crisis is the most dramatic failure of any leader in Ghana’s history as far as the management of a power crisis is concerned.

According to the Minority, blame for the country’s current electricity woes should be placed squarely on the government because the situation could have been averted if the president had acted swiftly and prudently.

Minority Leader Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu made these statements when he presented what the Minority called the “True State of the Nation Address” Wednesday.

He explained that this energy crisis, unlike previous ones, was caused by a gas shortage and financial difficulties on the part of the Volta River Authority (VRA).

He said the VRA was unable to procure the necessary quantities of crude oil and diesel because government was starving the power generator of badly needed funds.

“These factors… are within our control and we should not have allowed them to bring the level of energy crisis that we now have,” he declared.

The minority leader stated that government could have improved on the liquidity of the VRA to enable the energy generator to procure light crude oil as an alternative fuel to generate power.

“The NPP government used to support VRA to procure light crude oil by about US$40million every month. This support was withdrawn by the NDC [National Democratic Congress] government, in addition to the 400 million dollars of government’s indebtedness to VRA has crippled the company and made it difficult to procure the fuels for power generation."

He said that instead of resolving these problems, the president “is promising additional new generation capacity,” but has only named projects initiated under the old New Patriotic Party administration.

“At this point," he declared, "we need to ask the NDC what new investments they have made since they came to power in 2009.”

source: Myjoyonline