Mahama gov’t didn’t lose $3bn to dumsor – John Jinapor reacts

• Posted on August 15, 2017
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

John Jinapor, former Deputy Power minister has questioned the President’s claims that in 2014 alone, the country lost about GHc 600 million in economic activities under the then Mahama government.

At the National Policy Summit on August 14, 2017, President Akufo-Addo stated that Ghana lost about $3 billion in economic activities during power crisis that overwhelmed the nation under the Mahama government.

Nana Akufo-Addo added that Ghana lost about GHc 618 million in economic activities in 2014 alone which is equivalent to two percent of GDP.  He quoted these statistics from the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research.

John Jinapor, in an interview with Citi News, labelled as erroneous the calculations made by the President about the effects of  “Dumsor” under the NDC.

The former deputy Minister recalled that when he was a deputy minister in 2013/2014, “by the end of 2015, we had resolved the deficit. In the whole of the year 2016, we never had any load shedding programme because we had enough capacity beyond our demand.”

He continued that, “if we had any outage, it was a localized outage and so it couldn’t have been that in the four years of President Mahama, we had load shedding throughout.”

“If you do the arithmetic, the President claims that in 2014 alone, we lost about GHc 600 million. If you multiply GHc 600 million by 4, you will certainly not get $3 billion and so we would like to interrogate that information and subject it to critical scrutiny,” Mr. Jinapor added.

“The most important thing is that, by the time we left office, we had closed deficit and even with the low levels of the Akosombo dam, we had enough thermal complementation in order to ensure that we had adequate supply of power.”

Ghanaian business bore the brunt of the power crisis, which peaked intensified in a stretch from 2012 to 2016.

At the time, the Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA) lamented that the load shedding exercises their led to some companies laying off their workers.

In 2015, a report issued by (ISSER) Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research, Ghana loses about $2.2 million daily and $686.4 million annually due to the power crisis.

By: Rita Mensah