The President's handling of power crisis is a failure – Minority
The Minority in Parliament says the
president’s poor handling of the energy crisis is the most dramatic
failure of any leader in Ghana’s history as far as the management of a
power crisis is concerned.
According to the Minority, blame for
the country’s current electricity woes should be placed squarely on the
government because the situation could have been averted if the
president had acted swiftly and prudently.
Minority Leader Osei
Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu made these statements when he presented what the
Minority called the “True State of the Nation Address” Wednesday.
He
explained that this energy crisis, unlike previous ones, was caused by a
gas shortage and financial difficulties on the part of the Volta River
Authority (VRA).
He said the VRA was unable to procure the
necessary quantities of crude oil and diesel because government was
starving the power generator of badly needed funds.
“These
factors… are within our control and we should not have allowed them to
bring the level of energy crisis that we now have,” he declared.
The
minority leader stated that government could have improved on the
liquidity of the VRA to enable the energy generator to procure light
crude oil as an alternative fuel to generate power.
“The NPP
government used to support VRA to procure light crude oil by about US$40million every month. This support was withdrawn by the NDC
[National Democratic Congress] government, in addition to the 400
million dollars of government’s indebtedness to VRA has crippled the
company and made it difficult to procure the fuels for power
generation."
He said that instead of resolving these problems,
the president “is promising additional new generation capacity,” but has
only named projects initiated under the old New Patriotic Party
administration.
“At this point," he declared, "we need to ask the NDC what new investments they have made since they came to power in 2009.”
source: Myjoyonline
