Ghanaian President, John
Mahama, on Wednesday said the delay in the delivery of the crude oil ordered
from Nigeria had created power generation problems for his country, leading to
outages in many parts.
Mahama said the sabotage of
oil terminals in Nigeria occasioned the delay in the supply of crude oil, which
Ghana ordered last month.
Many parts of Ghana,
especially the capital, Accra, have witnessed a resurgence of power outages, a
problem that lasted four years but was declared over by former Minister for
Power Dr. Kwabena Donkor, last year, according to Classfmonline.com.
Mahama, speaking on the
occasion of the Eid il-Fitr celebration in Accra, was quoted to have said the
power outages were as a result of sabotage in Nigeria.
He said, “Recently, there
have been some issues with electricity tariffs; the Electricity Company of
Ghana has done some work on it. They have done a realignment of their billing
system and I believe that people can begin to feel some relief in terms of the
bills that they were paying. The bills have been made more transparent so that
you can tell with every unit you buy, how much the value of the unit is.
“Aside from that, we have
recently suffered some generational problems. I held a stakeholders’ meeting
with all those involved in the power sector. Because of sabotage in Nigeria on
the terminals, crude oil that we ordered last month has not arrived; and so, it
has created some generational problem for us.”
The President said he had
asked the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company to start storing at least
one month of light crude oil supplied for Ghana so that in the event of any
problem at the supply end in Nigeria, adding, “We were not affected the way we
are currently affected.
“So, I will crave your
indulgence and urge all of you to understand. We are not declaring load
shedding, I believe things will be normalised, but we are taking steps every
day to ensure that Ghana has security when it comes to power.”
The West African Gas
Pipeline Company had late last month said it had suspended the flow of gas from
Nigeria to Ghana over unpaid bills by the Ghanaian government.
Ghana’s state power
producer, Volta River Authority, owes Nigeria’s N-Gas around $180m, while N-Gas
in turn owes the pipeline company $104m, WAGPCo spokeswoman, Harriet
Wereko-Brobby, had told Reuters.
N-Gas is the main supplier
of gas to Ghana’s Volta River Authority through the West African Gas Pipeline.
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