Former President John Dramani Mahama has reiterated that the energy crisis which became popularly known as ‘dumsor’ was solved under his administration.
According to him, the rampant intermittent power outages were occasioned by the lack of investment into the generation of capacity by previous governments.
Speaking in an interview with Ugandan-based NBS television, Mahama said despite this he took responsibility to address the challenge which confronted him.
He mentioned that he added an estimated 3,000 megawatts of power to meet the growing demand for it.
Mahama said his investment was so much that he was eventually accused of excess generation.
He added however that the country risk slumping back into the era of ‘dumsor’ since the demand has caught up with supply.
“The actual cause of the energy crisis was the lack of investments over the years by previous governments in a generation [capacity].
“Ghana’s consumption had been rising by about 12% per annum in terms of electricity consumption but investment in an additional generation had been very slow.
“So we got to a stage where we were demanding and consuming more electricity than we had generation.
“We had the Akosombo Dam. We thought Akosombo will last forever, unfortunately, it didn’t. So we were consuming like 2,600 megawatts and our production was 2,300 megawatts so we had to go through a period of outages.
“What did I do? I took responsibility. I didn’t blame previous governments. I said yes you call me ‘Mr. Dumsor’…I inherited this problem but I take responsibility because you voted me into power to take responsibility and fix things and so I said I’m going to fix this and by 2015 I had added an additional almost 3,000 megawatts to Ghana’s generation.
“I was actually accused of putting in an excess generation...more generation than we needed. We are consuming 2,600 megawatts. Today we are consuming 1000 megawatts more and so if I didn’t put in that excess generation we probably would have started having an energy crisis again and it’s beginning to happen.
“Outages every day because the consumption has caught up the amount of energy that is available and we are beginning to have problems,” Mahama said.
