General News of Tuesday, 3 February 2015
Source: citifmonline.com
The Minority spokesperson on Energy K.T. Hammond has accused the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) of sabotaging the development of Ghana’s power sector.
“When it comes to helping to redeem the darkness that we find ourselves in, GNPC is sabotaging the system,” he stated on Eyewitness News.
K.T. Hammond argued that instead of putting Ghana’s oil money to judicious use, GNPC “spend all the oil money on hopeless and useless ventures like supporting Black Stars and putting up billboards… wasting our oil money.”
K.T Hammond insisted that, “I know what I’m talking about…very soon, I will come out with the clear details for it.”
He was responding to comments made by the Minister of Power, Kwabena Donkor at a press conference on Monday.
The minister assured that the power crisis currently facing the country would be resolved before the end of 2015 following a number of measures being implemented by government.
“To this end the Ministry is working on different Emergency Power arrangements to shore up the supply situation. These arrangements will eventually increase our generation capacity by about 1,000MW in the short term and ultimately provide us the platform to pursue the medium to long term solutions. We are hopeful that these measures will stabilize the situation,” the minister added.
But K.T Hammond disagreed saying such promises are not attainable in the shortest possible time because “the gestation period for these things is quite long.”
“We are in a critical and a serious situation. Akosombo is been hopelessly run, it’s gone, the Aboadze plants are in hopeless conditions. The installed capacity of about 2,800 megawatts, we are running just about 1200 megawatts, it’s a very dangerous situation,” he indicated.
He, however, advised the Power Minister to desist from making promises saying the power “situation is so cataclysmic that we will not take any promise on the face value.”