Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Energy in charge of Petroleum, Dr. Mohammed Amin Adam says the ruling party, New Patriotic Party (NPP), manages the country’s energy sector better than the opposition political party, NDC, anytime the former is in power.
According to him, when the NDC is in power, it mismanages the energy sector, but when the NPP takes over, it manages the sector very efficiently.
Making reference to the five years’ power crisis which the West African nation experienced between 2012 and 2016 under the NDC administration, Dr. Amin Adam, who is also the governing party’s Parliamentary Candidate for Karaga Constituency, said the NDC failed to make money available for the procurement of fuel to power the power plants.
He said upon assumption of office, the current administration stemmed the financial indiscipline in the sector and ensured that money was available for procurement of fuel.
“There has been debate as to whether we ended dumsor or the NDC ended dumsor, and I’m sure they may mentioned that when they appeared before you. But this is a confession by John Jinapor, the then Deputy Minister for Power, and this was a confession by him on October 26, 2016, when he conceded that dumsor was there. The cause, according to them, was financial which NPP had been drumming home about. Even when we also came into government, the first three to six months, we also had challenges because we were not going to stop dumsor overnight; we needed to put in place some measures so we had to, first of all, address the financial challenge of finding money to buy fuel to power our plants. The Nigerian gas was erratic, and most of the time, the gas was not coming and the NDC did not plan well to put in mechanism to flow our gas from the West to the East where we have most of the generation capacity. We had to find money to buy fuel to be able to fire the power plants,” Dr Mohammed Amin said at the Energy Manifesto Town Hall meeting organised by the Chamber of Bulk Oil Distributors (CBOD) in Accra last Friday, November 7, 2020.
He said the NDC left huge legacy debts in the country’s sector including GHc2 billion debt at the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
According to him, that debt had l been cleared by the current administration and also injected an amount of GHc4 billion into the operations of the ECG.
Apart from the power sector, Dr. Amin said the current administration has managed the downstream petroleum sector very well and ensured that there is availability of fuel products.
“We have also ensured that there is constant supply of petroleum products on the market and we have not had long queues that we experienced under the NDC at fuel stations. We have further improved on the quality of fuel supply and NPA has stood the test of time as afar as regulations are concerned,” he said.
Dr. Amin pledged the support of the governing party to ensure that there is constant supply of electricity when the NPP secures a second term in office in order for businesses to thrive in the post Covid-19 pandemic.
Source:www.energynewsafrica.com
