The Member of Parliament of the Bongo constituency and member of the Mines and Energy Committee, Edward Bawa, has stated that thegovernment has not made any intervention in the energy sector of the economy.
The Bongo legislator said this in an interview with Alfred Ocansey, host of TV3’s Ghana Tonight programme on Monday, March 25.
According to Mr. Bawa, the government should credit former President John Dramani Mahama, indicating that the current stability in the power sector is a result of Mr. Mahama’s investment in the sector.
“From 2017 up to now that we started having challenges, when the President indicates that we have kept the lights on you to ask one simple question…give us one single intervention you put in to ensure that the lights have been on for the past seven years.”
He stressed that no person in government can be able to point to a single investment the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration has made in the power sector.
He maintained that the government enjoyed stable power owing to the investment of former President Mahama, stating that, “this investment is supposed to be ongoing”.
He further criticised the government for misapplying the funds accrued from the Energy Sector Levy Act (ESLA). ESLA was enacted to raise revenue to defray the legacy debt in the energy sector.
“We expected that for example, the government will say we still have liquidity and then financial issues with us and that the previous government has set up the Energy Sector Recovery Act, that was supposed to guarantee some inflows, how do we use this thing responsibly to ensure that we retire the legacy debt and ensure that we do not pile up new debts?”, he stated.
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He also asserted that because ECG does not want to be seen as shedding power, the power distributor does not collaborate with GRIDCo regarding the amount of power GRIDCo can supply, indicating that such action can cause a total shutdown.
“…what they do is that, they ignore GRIDCo and usually you must make sure the demand and supply there is a correspondence, the moment the demand outweighs the supply and you do not put in measures to deal with it, you will have a total shutdown, that is where you will have the whole country going down,” said the Bongo lawmaker.
Meanwhile, the Public Utility Regulatory Commission’s (PURC) directive to the ECG last week, amongst other orders, directed the power distributor to publish a “load management timetable” to correspond with the timelines and duration for each transformer injection.
But the power distributor insisted that there’s no Dumsor, hence there is no need for a power rationing schedule.