The Power Minister, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, has appeared before the Government Assurances Committee in Parliament to set the record straight after comments he recently made to clarify his promise to end the country’s power crisis.
Dr. Donkor, when he was appointed by President Mahama, announced that he would resign if the power crisis persisted after 2015 and has reiterated that promise on different occasions.
[contextly_sidebar id=”YDlDA34HQckqF47rLEPKtKSTLJri4zKj”]However, the Minister recently sought to clarify his promise when answering questions posed to him by pressure group Occupy Ghana, stating that his promises was to end the load shedding programme and not power outages entirely.
Ghanaians who were skeptical of Dr. Donkor’s promise were up in arms following his comments.
According to them, the Minister is only making excuses to absolve himself of any blame and get out of resigning should the power crisis not end entirely at the end of the year, a claim Dr. Donkor dismissed on Wednesday.
“I have been at pains at very places to make a critical distinction that the new lexicon, dumsor does not reflect. Load shedding arises out of generation deficit. In ordinary language we would say power rationing, because we don’t have enough. That is what I promised on the floor of the House to work towards its cessation,” Dr. Donkor said.
According to the power minister, while his ministry was working towards ending the load shedding programme, it would not be possible to curtail outages as a result of faulty transmitters or activities of criminals who steal the copper cables.
“You can have all the generation and also have outages in particular areas. Four weeks ago, in the Tema community alone, five of our transmitters were vandalized because people want to steal copper from our transformers. When that happens, irrespective of our generation available, that locality will not have power until the ECG either repairs the transformers or replaces them. That is the situation we term localized outage.
“Therefore I am very careful of the over generalization, because if you don’t make that distinction, I am not accountable for the thievery and vandalism of some Ghanaians and that it why it is important I make that distinction. Underground cables have also been stolen. Those are acts arising out of criminality.” There are certain occasions with some of our modern transformers; when they are overloaded, they will cut and a transformer serves a particular locality.”
A poll was taken by Citi FM on Tuesday on Twitter to see whether Ghanaians shared the view of the Power Minister on his insistence that load shedding and dumsor should be differentiated.
32 percent of the 263 respondents disagreed with Dr. Donkor while 11 percent thought the Power Minister had a point
Is there a difference between dumsor and load shedding? #CitiCBS
— 97.3 Citi FM (@Citi973) December 22, 2015
An overwhelming 57 percent, however, though the distinction between load shedding and dumsor was unnecessary when all they wanted was light.
By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @EdKwakofi