Ghanaians’ concerns about the recurrence of power outages have been allayed by Deputy Minister for Energy Andrew Agyapa Mercer.
He claimed that the “dumsor,” or recent blackouts of electricity, had been fixed.
In an interview with Bernard Avle on Citi FM, Mr. Mercer said that the Ministry of Finance had reinforced the commitment to a continuous supply of power by paying $10 million to the West African Gas Pipeline Company Limited (WAPCo) for gas supply on January 10, 2024.
“What has happened over the past few days is that some obligation owed by GNPC to WAPCo was an issue. WAPCo threatened [and] GNPC made some initial payments [but] it wasn’t satisfactory. We requested the Ministry of Finance to top up. We had to go through some approval processes.
“As of yesterday [Wednesday] evening the Ministry of Finance had approved a sum of 10 million to pay for a part of that debt. So that was the hiccup that we encountered that led to the power outages we encountered in the past few days. But that has been resolved.”
Mr. Agyapa Mercer added “Yesterday, WAGCo said it was going to restore and that was accordingly made from the West to the East, to power plants in the East. And so there is no ‘dumsor’ to warrant the shedding.”
Meanwhile, the Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Security (IES), Nana Amoasi VII, says Ghana is likely to experience more outages in the coming days.
Andrew Agyapa Mercer claimed that financial difficulties are the cause of the recent outages.
Meanwhile, Kofi Ofosu Nkansah, the CEO of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP), has been made available.
On Wednesday, January 10, the Special Prosecutor detained Mr. Ofosu Nkansah, who is running for the Asante Akim Central parliamentary seat against Anyimadu Antwi, the incumbent, for allegedly giving money to delegates prior to the NPP Parliamentary primaries.
