The Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr, has detailed the origins of the nation’s power outage issues, tracing them to the era of Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
He explained that Dr. Nkrumah had ambitions to enhance the energy sector’s capacity, but these plans were thwarted by his ousting in a coup and the subsequent advice of a British expert against such expansion.
This led to the postponement of the Bui Dam construction, which impacted electricity generation.
Pratt also mentioned that Dr. Nkrumah’s administration had developed a seven-year development plan proposing numerous hydroelectric projects nationwide.
However, these plans were discarded by later governments, contributing to the ongoing power outages.
“After the 1966 coup against Nkrumah, the government then brought in a British expert who insisted that we didn’t need to expand capacity. At the time, the Soviet Union had sent experts to build the Bui Dam. They were actually on site; we stopped that project. The Soviet experts went back home. That is why the Bui Dam delayed all this time. Because of the advice, we stopped the Bui Dam project.
“Now, if you look at the seven-year development plan of the Nkrumah regime, it proposed many hydro projects across the country. That was also stopped. We’ve never done it until today. At the time, we were also seriously considering the nuclear option for power generation and had actually entered into an agreement with the Soviet Union, which was also stopped on the advice of a so-called British energy expert. That is where our problems began,” he recounted while speaking in an interview with Metro TV, as monitored by GhanaWeb.
Pratt refuted the notion that the energy crisis was a result of former President Kufuor’s administration.
“In fact, the problems in the energy sector – some people think it was caused by the Kufuor administration – is not true. The crisis was already there before Kufuor came into office. It only hit us during his regime,” he clarified.
In recent times, numerous people, including those in political circles, have raised alarms about the inconsistent electricity supply affecting certain areas.
The authorities and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) have opted not to publish a load-shedding timetable, explaining that the intermittent power outages are due to maintenance work in progress.
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