Ghana’s power supply problems trace back not to generation shortfalls alone, but to years of mismanagement inside the very company tasked with delivering electricity to homes and businesses, President John Dramani Mahama has declared.
Addressing entrepreneurs and business leaders at the Kwahu Business Forum on Saturday, Mahama pointed a sharp finger at the Electricity Company of Ghana, arguing that the distributor’s internal inefficiencies have done as much damage to reliable power as any shortfall at the generation level. His remarks come at a time when frequent outages continue to frustrate households and cripple small enterprises across the country.
At the heart of the president’s critique is ECG’s procurement record, which he described as fundamentally misaligned with the network’s actual needs. Rather than investing in critical distribution hardware, the company had for years poured resources into items that did little to strengthen the grid. “ECG was procuring… street lights that can light from Accra to Burkina Faso, and yet they were still procuring more street lights,” he said, drawing attention to the absurdity of the spending pattern. The government, he explained, has now redirected procurement toward transformers — the backbone of local electricity distribution — and ECG is actively replacing ageing units while purchasing new ones to keep pace with demand.
Mahama also highlighted how Ghana’s rapid urbanisation has outstripped existing infrastructure. As new housing developments spring up and more residents connect to the grid, transformers designed for smaller loads are buckling under pressure. “As urban centres grow, you find that more people finish their houses and connect, and suddenly the transformer is not powerful enough… So you need to replace it with a bigger transformer,” he noted. The observation underscores a challenge that extends well beyond ECG: urban planning and utility investment have consistently lagged behind the pace at which Ghanaian cities are expanding.
The president conceded that the ongoing upgrade programme will not be painless. Replacement works inevitably require sections of the network to be taken offline, meaning some communities will experience temporary blackouts even as conditions improve overall. “So sometimes when your light goes off, it’s because of the work they are doing to improve the power supply in your area,” he explained, urging patience from consumers. New management structures and reformed procurement systems, he said, are already beginning to yield results.
For millions of Ghanaians who have endured erratic power for years, the reforms represent a test of whether institutional change at ECG can translate into the one thing that matters most — a light switch that works every time it is flipped.
Source: MyJoyOnline
