Desist from playing politics with energy sector — Deputy Minister designate

A deputy minister designate for Energy, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam, has asked politicians to desist from playing politics with the energy sector, saying what politicians should rather be concerned about is how to meet demand.

He said the argument among politicians about how much installed capacity a particular government added to the grid was needless.

Dr Adam, who appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Tuesday, expressed optimism that Ghana could overcome its energy challenges with good and pragmatic policies.

VRA and NEDCo

Asked whether the Volta River Authority (VRA) should be privatised, he stated that he did not support a complete privatisation, but aspects of its work should be privatised and developed into a holding company.

He called for the privatisation of the thermal assets of the VRA while maintaining the managerial assets.

Dr Adam stated that he would support his minister if a decision was made to disaggregate the core functions of the institution from its non-core functions.

On the challenges facing the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo) in terms of bills collection, the deputy minister designate questioned the extent to which the company had educated the people to pay their bills.

He gave an assurance that he would support the minister to get NEDCo to engage the people more and that the company’s areas of operation had more life-line consumers than industrial ones for which reason the government provided subsidies for them, thereby rendering the company financially weak.

To overcome that challenge, he proposed that the government should consider bringing industrial consumers into the NEDCo zone or rezoning the customer profile of NEDCo to include the mines to raise the needed funds to reposition company to the become a viable one.

Global oil prices

Dr Adam, who is currently the Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), a civil society organisation, talked about the soaring global oil prices and indicated that there was a stabilisation fund in place to absorb the shocks but added that more needed to be done to achieve a full result.

The nominee mentioned that he had been working with the substantive minister over the years in making the use of solar power an alternative form of energy for most homes and gave an assurance that he would support the energy minister to achieve his target in renewable energy.

Responding to questions on the tariff regime, he said tariffs in Ghana were the highest in the sub-region and explained that the country was unable to sell off the excess from energy to other countries.

On that score, he said he would support the minister to consider ways of reducing the generation cost and boost the efficiency level of the plants.

Dr Adam underscored the need for Ghana to engage plants with high efficiency levels to reduce tariffs.

He lauded the Mahama administration for its efforts to end ‘dumsor,’ saying the government took some good steps with the delivery of some emergency plants but complained about the cost of bringing those plants.

Joseph Cudjoe

Earlier, another Deputy Minister designate for Energy, Mr Joseph Cudjoe, had stated that he was bringing financial and managerial expertise to the ministry.

He declared his support for the substantive minister and when asked whether ‘dumsor’ had ended, he said “dumsor is a precautionary stable which takes time to manage with an improved economy.”

Mr Cudjoe, who is also the Member of Parliament for Effia, expressed his resolve to support the minister to deepen deregulation in the power sector, noting that there were already policies and programmes in place to achieve that objective.

He assured the committee that he would support the minister to ensure the effective implementation of the second Millennium Challenge Compact.