Former President John Dramani Mahama has said during his time in office, he accepted responsibility for the power crisis that confronted the country and fixed it.
The former president was speaking in an interview on Ugandan-based NBS television.
Explaining the cause of the power crisis that hit the country during his presidency, Mr Mahama said: “We had the Akosombo Dam. We thought Akosombo will last forever” but “unfortunately, it didn’t”.
“So, we were consuming like 2,600 megawatts and our production was 2,300 megawatts, so, we had to go through a period of outages”, he recalled.
“What did I do? I took responsibility”, he said.
“I didn’t blame previous governments”, the 2020 flag bearer of the biggest opposition party said, adding: “I said, ‘yes, you call me ‘Mr. Dumsor’…I inherited this problem but I take responsibility because you voted me into power to take responsibility and fix things and, so, I said I’m going to fix this’, and, by 2015, I had added an additional almost 3,000 megawatts to Ghana’s generation.”
According to the former President, the initiative by his government to put in excess generation paid off, otherwise, the country would have been plunged into another power crisis before now.
“I was actually accused of putting in an excess generation…more generation than we needed”, Mr Mahama noted.
He said: “We are consuming 2,600 megawatts”.
“Today, we are consuming 1000 megawatts more and, so, if I didn’t put in that excess generation, we probably would have started having an energy crisis again and it’s beginning to happen”, he noted.
“Outages every day because the consumption has caught up the amount of energy that is available and we are beginning to have problems,” Mr Mahama stated.