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Jehovah! Ghana's energy crisis?
YES. The possessive is real. Ghana has energy crisis. Avery long running shortage of electric power - since August 2006. To me, the surprise factor is not just the detail that it is happening for the third time in a decade. But a foreseen third time that lacked adequate preparation of remedies. An inattention-borne third time, so to say.
Without going deep into the causes and the measures the government is putting in place to redeem this situation, I have always taken the risk of prejudice by saying that the energy crisis is a flaw - an unpardonable flaw - versus Kufuor's pledge to "implement a maintenance culture" with regards to state infrastructure. He made this clear during his first inaugural speech, in reference to his elaborate rehab policy.
In my last article about the progress of Kufuor's administration, I barely mentioned the effects of the energy crisis. Having not the facts at the time, I do not regret the cautious brevity with which I handled the subject. I had to study it from afar. Now I have the obvious:
Social effect
If I were in my beloved Ghana, my desktop would have been idle while I write this composition under candle or torch. Unfortunately tens of thousand students preparing for exams couldn't run away from fate. They had to go through a faint supply of electricity. God knows the impact it may have on the awaiting SSCE results.
People who can't afford generators spend their boring evenings in fear of arm robbery. Communal meetings are often cancelled, and sometimes dissolved when lights go off unannounced, I was told.
Economic effect
With an increasing demand of oil to power homes and industries, experts believe that prices would soon rise to an all time high. Businesses that can't cross the deep blue sea have closed. And those who braved it have drowned - a large number of industries have either collapsed or become stunted in output.
The industrial expansion that was said to be growing around 7 per cent annually for the past six years is a good news. But I've seen it as near decline once the Central Bank Governor warned that there's "a likely drop of the GDP growth for the year 2007, below the targeted 6.5 per cent, due to the impact of the energy crisis on the mining and manufacturing sectors".
In their research, Data Bank found that "if the (energy) situation does not improve soon, the country (Ghana) could lose up to $1.4 billion by the end of the year". The clock is ticking.
Political effect
In my quest to know the cause of this adverse condition, I found out that the government and the Volta River Authority (VRA) were shifting blame of negligence on each other.
Regardless of the level of co-ordination between these bodies during the poor inflow of rainwater into the Akosombo Dam, neutral parties would be right to chide the Minister of Energy without sparing the VRA. By then, none was up to the duty of effective preparation in abridging an impending natural scarcity.
The end is near and there's darkness. Sorry, Kufuor couldn't conjure light. Also the proposed 400 megawatts Bui Dam and the West African Gas Pipeline are years away from saving their demise.
So who thinks the NPP is still the sharpest knife in the draw? Will the fair-minded people of Ghana consider loyalty over failure, or party glory over national interest? NPP, NDC etc are their values the same?
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