General News of Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Source: peacefmonline.com
General Secretary of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kwabena Agyei Agyapong believes the Power Minister’s blame of the energy crisis on maintenance shows that the NDC government is not serious with the energy situation in the country.
According to the Chief Scribe, there should have been an alternative plan after realizing that they cannot produce the hydro at maximum capacity since the engineers know the energy crisis didn’t start today.
Speaking on Oman FM’s Morning Show, Kwabena Agyapong wondered the kind of maintenance plan that will allow all the machines to develop a fault; insisting that the NDC’s maintenance plan is poor.
“With all these energy challenges, we have to blame it on the government. What kind of maintenance plan is in place to make all the generators damage at the same time? Your maintenance plan is poor because the generators are machines and so without solid maintenance plan, they will breakdown,” he chided.
He further stated that the VRA is not in any financial position to procure light crude to power the plants because the government and other agencies owe the Volta River Authority close to 2 billion Cedis; emphasizing that this is the truth about the energy situation.
“Are we saying we are in a country where all our generators can damage at the same time? There is something amiss they don’t want to tell us…if the President per his earlier promise in 2012 till date could not solve the energy situation, what shows within a year, the minister can work out something to resolve the energy situation,” he argued.
“They should give us the financial details and timeline…there is something there they are not telling us; we need to be serious in this country and it is strange that after 7 years of NDC in power they still blame the energy failure on the past government. You mean in 7 years you couldn’t plan? In any case, NPP left enough install capacity at least around 2,900mw and in Ghana our peak load is around 2000mw. This means there was enough reserved for maintenance and other things,” he opined.