Parliament is expected to take delivery of new generators to support their operations during blackouts.
This has been necessitated by the frequent breakdown of the House’s existing generators which affects Parliamentary work.
Parliamentary proceedings on Wednesday were halted after a major blackout.
[contextly_sidebar id=”XFGp8tnqolI627lZpNqr73yRYNlsHJV9″]The Deputy Public Affairs Director of Parliament, Kate Addo in an interview with Citi News’ Parliamentary correspondent, Richard Dela Sky said the outages are a frequent occurrence.
“Admittedly, this is not the first time that it is happening. It has happened a couple of times,” she said.
Explaining what caused the blackout on Wednesday, Kate Addo said: “there are two generators that are powering the grounds at the moment. When the lights went off, one side did not come on automatically so the Developments Department had to go in and look at it. It took about half-an-hour for them to work on the machine for it to start work… The current generator I think was purchased in 1996 so it’s quite old.”
This problem will however be a thing of the past soon because Kate Addo announced that Parliament has started the process to acquire new generators.
“At the moment, the board has approved and the procurement processes are being followed so I am sure that within the shortest possible time, we will get new equipment and this will be a thing of the past…” she said, but she was however unable to tell how much the new generator sets will cost the nation.
She acknowledged the fact that Parliament should rather be pressurizing government to solve the power crisis instead but was quick to point out that there are “policy formulators who deal with this issues…so yes, the problem is there and I am sure the policy formulators are listening to us and are doing something about it.”
“…but this is the House of Representation and for us to be able to approve the facilities for other people to purchase we must be able to work, we need the electricity to work.”
Grading the performance of Ghana’s Parliament, Madam Addo said the nation’s Legislature “is not doing too badly looking at the Parliaments around the world.”
“Of course we’ve been under major scrutiny lately and that has made us to sit up a bit more…so we are hoping that eventually, we will be able to tell the good people of Ghana how our Parliament is relevant in our society.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @osamidan