In recent weeks the country has been experiencing intermittent power outages and even where power is present, consumers experience low current and power surges.
We all know how these power problems disturb social and economic lives. Last Sunday, for instance, the power fluctuations destroyed some household appliances and the cost to repair or replace them has to be borne by the owners.
The less talk about the harm done to industries and small-scale businesses the better.
What is more disturbing is in spite of poor services from the energy providers, bills are rising.
Happily, the Minister of Energy, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, is said to have appealed to Ghanaians to remain calm as steps are being taken to address the intermittent power outages being experienced in some parts of the country.
He emphasised that there was no way the government would allow the country to slip back into the prolonged period of power outages between 2012 and 2016 which became known as ‘dumsor.’
The minister said the government was working feverishly to resolve the challenges which have arisen as a result of technical difficulties with our transmission lines, which he describes as old.
Power outages are caused by various factors but mainly technical and financial. In the current situation, the Energy Minister says what is happening has nothing to do with financial challenge as being speculated but rather purely technical.
Even the Ghanaian Times has no cause to doubt what the minister is saying, the paper believes that technical problems mostly have the roots of their solutions in finances.
This makes us think that the minister is implying that there are enough funds to tackle the technical problems in the energy sector.
This is good news. Therefore, we wish to join the minister and, for that matter, the government to appeal to Ghanaians to exercise restraints while the problem is fixed.
Even though, we cannot fathom the magnitude of the problem, the fact that the minister says the problem could be solved by December gives us some inkling that it is not something so little.
This is why the appeal for calm is very important to consumers and while we wait, we have to take precautions that would help us. For instance, when there is light we should charge our phone and use them for important communications; iron our dresses and hang them rather than iron a dress only when we want to go out.
We should also endeavor to use mechanisms like fridge guard that absorb the effectsof power fluctuations.
The Ghanaian Times wishes to appeal that since there are enough funds to fix the problem in the energy sector, the government should not just fix the current problems but assess what it can do proactively to prevent the recurrence of dumsor in any form or shape.
To that end, we urge strict maintenance and replacement of old and weak transmission lines and machines.
