Sammy Gyamfi, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC)’s communications officer, has denied assertions that former President John Dramani Mahama is partially to blame for the recent “dumsor” power outages.
Recently, there has been “dumsor” in several areas of the nation, which has alarmed both residents and businesses. The public has been reassured by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) that a load-shedding schedule is not now necessary in spite of this.
On the other hand, the NDC has expressed disapproval of the way the government has handled the “dumsor” issue and has called for a timeline for its resolution.
During an interview with Umaru Sanda Amadu on Face to Face on Citi TV, Sammy Gyamfi explained that the sporadic power outages were caused by problems that were carried over from previous administrations. He made it clear that neither John Dramani Mahama nor the NDC were the ones to start “dumsor.”
He cited examples of “dumsor” in past administrations and blamed the problem on a failure to increase investment in power generation to keep up with rising demand.
“Dumsor was not a creation of H.E Mahama and the NDC. Even before 2001, Ghana had recorded ‘dumsor’ in 1984, 1988, 1989 you recall. The infamous decision by President J.A Kufuor [former] to send pastors to Akosombo to pray in 2007 for rains to fall.
“We recorded ‘dumsor’ at the end of former presidents J.J. Rawlings and Kufuor terms. That problem was largely because successive governments had failed to make significant investments in increasing generation. In consonance with increasing demand.”
“If you look at where our generational capacity ought to have been in 2012, we were there as a country and that a collective failure we are all sharing. Even though this problem was an inherited problem, we didn’t go about making flimsy excuses. Mahama said he was the president the bucks stops with him. He took full responsibilities and promised to fix it.”
