Governance expert and former UN Advisor on Governance, Professor Baffour Agyeman-Duah, has admonished President Nana Akufo-Addo to provide Ghanaians with updates on the current power situation in the country, just as he did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He believes that such updates would increase the level of trust the citizens impose on the government, stating that “trust is a critical ingredient in good governance.”
“A critical ingredient for good governance is trust that the citizens have for the government. In fact, trust is considered a huge political capital in good governance, just as trust is also essential social capital for social interactions,” said Prof. Agyeman-Duah on TV3’s Ghana Tonight programme on Monday, April 22.
According to Prof. Agyeman-Duah, a situation where the citizens believe that the government is not transparent in delivering the services that are required leads to mistrust in the government.
“The more we have mistrust in government, the more the crisis of that relationship between citizens and government becomes.
Dumsor Politics and Election 2024: The government hasn't been too active in seeking solutions to problems. – Prof. Baffour Agyeman-Duah, Governance Expert#GhanaTonight pic.twitter.com/Ir6ie2Tx1Y
— #TV3GH (@tv3_ghana) April 23, 2024
“In my very humble view, the president, just as he did so beautifully during the COVID crisis, could respond to this by coming publicly to make some pronouncements on this,” he said concerning calls for the ECG to release a load-shedding (dumsor) timetable, adding that “the president has been very quiet on the situation,” he told Alfred Ocansey.
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Prof. Agyeman-Duah further called on President Akufo-Addo to demonstrate leadership by engaging with all the players in the power sector to find an amicable solution to the ongoing erratic power supply.
The governance expert underscored that he would be surprised if the president hadn’t called for such a meeting to be held.
“I will be surprised that the president has not called the leadership of the VRA, GRIDCo, ECG, and PURC, to sit them down to give them the marching order that he doesn’t like what they are doing.
“That is leadership, we need the president to be giving the marching orders. As I said, if he has done it privately, I don’t know, but based on the public pronouncements by these state agencies in charge of the energy sector, it seems like he hasn’t done that,” he said.
However, pressure continues to mount on the power distributor, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), to publish a load-shedding timetable as several parts of the country continue to sleep in darkness.