Power crisis: Our Achilles’ heel

The fact remains uncontested that the single most difficult challenge that has affected the totality of Ghanaians in the past two decades is power crisis.

Although the crisis gave early warning signs before its ultimate eruption some three years ago, as a country, we failed to take due cognisance of those signs. Life continued as though nothing mattered and today, we are faced with the uphill task of surmounting the challenges posed by the power crisis.

The Daily Graphic has decided to re-visit this issue because of recent developments that seem to deride the expectations that Ghanaians hold regarding an imminent end to the power crisis.

This has become so in view of the conflicting statements from ministers of state on the power crisis which indicate that they are not singing from the same hymn book.

Since the onslaught of the load-shedding exercise in 2012, Ghanaians, quite commendably, have exercised patience.

Indeed, we have taken every excuse and reason adduced by the various bodies responsible for power generation and distribution in our stride and lived with it with much discomfort and loss.

There have been countless occasions when those bodies, namely, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) and the Volta River Authority (VRA) have each given reasons why the load shedding has to be undertaken.

Over the period, various political players have been engulfed in blame games, rationalisations and equalisations.

Clearly, some vested interests may want to use the situation to score political points, and while that may remain their right, there is the need to go beyond parochial interests and put the larger picture of nationalism in perspective.

To be able to do so, the government also needs to break away from the self-defence mechanism it has been involved in and rather open up to the fact that this is a challenge that requires all hands on deck to manage.

Clearly, the crisis does not favour any particular political entity, thereby rendering any attempt at politicising it irrelevant.

Ghanaian businesses are folding up; revenue to the state keeps declining; the rate of unemployment keeps soaring since companies are downsizing due to the power crisis.

The picture, looking ahead, is one of gloom and doom, since there seems to be no end in sight to the power crisis.

The toll the crisis is having on small-scale enterprises is at once counter-productive and debilitating.

Clearly, the power crisis cannot be resolved instantly but needs to be phased out over a period and that is the reality that the government must be seen to be propagating and preparing for.

The Daily Graphic wishes to entreat the government to come out boldly and engage all in finding lasting solutions to the problem.

Regardless of its stance on the situation, the onus of responsibility lies on the government, and that is the more reason why it must damn the consequences and open up for a national pooling of ideas for a solution to the major bottlenecks that threaten to destabilise the transformational agenda.