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0 The Energy Minister has described as “unacceptable” the long delays in restoring power during outages, especially after rainfall, promising swift reforms to tackle what he called avoidable inefficiencies in the power sector.
John Abdulai Jinapor, speaking on PM Express on Joy News on Wednesday, April 30, admitted that the challenges in the sector are severe. “It’s been tough, it’s been difficult,” he said.
“It’s going to take very difficult decisions, and we’ve started implementing some decisions.”
He explained that while systemic issues like obsolete transformers and ageing lines cannot be fixed overnight, current response times and poor communication are inexcusable.
“Immediately it goes off, people must move in,” he said firmly.
“Sometimes you hear complaints about people saying that we’ve been off for one day, two days, and nobody has come. That is unacceptable. It will stop.”
Mr. Jinapor expressed deep frustration at the recurring outages during rainstorms.
“I do not see why the lights always go off when it rains. It makes no sense to me,” he said.
“Yesterday [April 29], when it rained, about 21 feeders went off.” He acknowledged explanations from ECG but pushed back hard: “I said, you must stretch yourself beyond what you are doing now.”
According to the minister, these power cuts are a result of years of neglect.
“The equipment and the machinery are so obsolete that it is what we’ve inherited. We now must ensure that we upgrade it and make it more robust, more resilient, so that it can serve the people,” he said.
But he stressed that infrastructure problems must not be used as excuses for poor service delivery.
He cited a personal experience to illustrate the broken communication within the system.
“I went to a shop to buy something about two months ago, and the woman said the light had been off since 11 in the morning. When she called the control centre, they said they were sending technical people,” he recounted.
“Then I called the MD, who said, Oh, they’ve announced that we’re going to do some routine work, so they would have finished by 5 pm—which is good. But how come that the lady sitting at the control centre did not know?” he questioned.
The minister said better information flow would calm aggrieved customers.
“That lady would have been told, please don’t worry, we are doing something good to make the lines better. It will help you in the long run, so please bear with us by 5 pm, you’ll be back online,” he noted.
“But when you tell the customer that the men are coming to fix it and they are not coming, it creates a problem.”
Mr. Jinapor said immediate, medium, and long-term measures are being rolled out to stabilise the national grid.
“We are putting in place all the necessary mechanisms to ensure that the response time is very quick,” he assured.
He also revealed he was scheduled to meet with ECG at 1:30 pm that same day for a “very crucial meeting.”
He stressed that reform is non-negotiable. “We must get to a level where, when it rains, the lights will stay on,” he said.
“We are dealing with the short-term measures, the medium-term measures, and then some long-term measures to stabilise the grid.”
