By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 3, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
When I first visited Ghana to bury the mortal remains of my mother in May 1998, after nearly 13 years of residing here in the United States, "Dumsor," or electricity rationing, was in full swing. But what is even more significant to observe here is that it was the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) that tightly held onto the reins of governance and, to be certain, had been doing so under the guise of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) for some 17 protracted years.
And so what does Alhaji Iddrisu Bature, managing-editor of the Al-Hajj tabloid, mean when he faults the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) for not boosting up the country's energy voltage in order to meet the demands of an increasing population and an exponentially expanding industrial capacity? (See "Blame NPP for the 'Dumsor Dumsor' - Alhaji Bature" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/3/14).
You see, Mr. Bature, Ghanaians are far smarter and more sophisticated than you seem to think. First of all, you need to present your audiences with facts and figures vis-a-vis the level and degree of practical contributions made by the Rawlings-led government of the Provisional/ National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) to the country's energy-generation capacity before you presume to so facilely take us for granted. For example, Gen. I. K. Acheampong, whom Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, founding-father of the National Democratic Congress, summarily executed by firing squad on the pretext of rank corruption and moral decadence, built the Kpong Dam, which added several hundred kilowatts to Akosombo.
Now, show us what power plant(s) the Rawlings junta/regime erected to boost energy production in the country. As New Yorkers are wont to say, "Talk Is Cheap." At any rate, let me provide you with a memory-jogging hint of what Mr. Rawlings did to Ghana's power construction and distribution. To cheaply back up his self-righteous political rhetoric, all that the Rawlings-led faux-democratic government of the National Democratic Congress did was to merely and indiscriminately connect legions of towns and villages to the Akosombo power grid, without any intelligent pre-supply analysis of the economic implications of vacuously siphoning power without any concerted strategy to boosting the generation capacity of this finite or limited energy resource.
In other words, for most of the nearly two decades that Chairman Rawlings maintained a stranglehold on Ghanaian politics, he merely performed the patently primitive and regressive role of a blind and greedy consumer of the country's scarce energy resources. Meanwhile, the key players of the NDC were busy supplying Akosombo-generated power to a couple of our neighbors at virtually giveaway prices. Mr. Bature, it is the embarrassingly unenlightened policies of the NDC that landed Ghanaians in the sort of Stygian energy mess in which we presently find ourselves.
And so, really, the Bolgatanga street brawler has a lot of chutzpah when he so vacuously announces the following: "Trust me, this energy crisis will be over soon.... I can assure you of that." When did Mr. Bature acquire the license to generate and supply electricity to Ghanaian homes and industries? And on precisely what strength is his rather pontifical promise based?
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