President John Dramani Mahama has appealed to Ghanaians to remain patient over power outages being experienced in some communities, saying the disruptions are not a return to the dreaded dumsor era but temporary interruptions caused by ongoing transformer replacement work.
The President made the appeal on Saturday during a visit to the Northern Electricity Distribution Company yard in Tamale, where he inspected a batch of transformers being prepared for nationwide deployment as part of the government’s programme to upgrade the country’s ageing power infrastructure.
“The outages we are facing are not dumsor. It is to enable you to get better quality and stable power,” the President said.
The President assured residents that they would be informed in advance whenever transformer replacement work was scheduled in their area, giving them time to prepare for the temporary loss of power.
“Anytime they are going to replace transformers, they will inform the people in the area so that they are aware that their lights are going to be put off for a while until the transformers are installed,” he said.
President Mahama said the root of the problem lay in decades of failure to upgrade transformers to keep pace with Ghana’s growing population and expanding communities.
He pointed to a transformer in Nungua that had been in service for 22 years as an example of the scale of the infrastructure challenge, noting that communities had grown far beyond the capacity of equipment installed a generation ago.
He commended NEDCO and ECG for the work being done and called on both institutions to complement the infrastructure upgrade with better customer service, including faster response times when faults are reported.
Richard Aniagyei, ISD
