At any time and throughout the entire nation of Ghana the power grid can fail, or for want of a better term be switched off. This sometimes happens unannounced, without apology, and without explanation to the public. Added to this unbelievable catastrophe, is the fact that the duration of outages can also last any amount of time. What is worst than this still is that recently there where a number of total or national failures, where the entire nations electricity was simply wiped out. This happened without adequate believable, and feasible explanation.
The "routine" failures however are no new phenomena, it has been going on for all of the fifty odd years of the independence in Ghana, and been happening under all political parties who have been given the responsibility to rule.
I originally wrote about this some six years ago in this blog article entitled "Is this Culture?". Most people in Ghana think this mess to be quite normal. Hence the coined phase "Light off" which conveniently diminishes the severity of the damage being done, not only to the quality of domestic life, but also to future growth and prospected industrialisation of the nation as a whole.
It is fair to assume that today's poverty and want was cause by yesterday's no confidants, in a country that couldn't sustain within the limits of required profit any multinational company who may for natural resource reasons have looked at ghana.
After all how can I make cars for example, even though the raw materials are present and the cost of transporting them low, when the prospected factory would suffer power outages that in turn would eat into profit and viability on an unquantifiable amount?
Even if you where prepared to suffer some loss the fact that the power grid fails randomly means you cannot factor in the loss amount, it is unseen. Which is why NO serious company who are able to make multimillion dollar investments based on manufacturing can look at Ghana because she at the moment would be like going to the casino.
Ghana a total gamble in terms of manufacturing industry investments, with the odds unseen making her a dead horse in the field of other quantifiable alternatives. This is the final nail in the coffin of a "middle income nation" or a nation that is able to provided jobs for any substantial amount of its populous.
Someone has to tell it like it is. News flash! Ghanaians your condition will NEVER improve even for the next 100 years unless they fix the national power grid to match most other countries.
Both sides of the political divided who have coined phases "we are moving forward" and "a better Ghana" even though they are exactly what is required in words, can never materialise them without dependable power.
I would go as far as to say that the power grid catastrophe is the principle undoing of the nation of Ghana period bar none. Ghana has no equal problem to it. Yet it is never addressed enough or tackled enough to bring about any change.
The tragedy is that most of the people who have suffered so long under this injustice have gotten used to their misfortune so much that they don't see the full extent of the hurt and damage not only to present Ghana but Ghana in the future also. This condition of the people only ensures that the problems remain as no one is vigorously calling those responsible to account.
Causes and excuses.
Seeing we are in a scenario where nearly all people in the country don't realize the gravity and urgency of this problem we are left with excuses that are contemptuous nonsensical and plainly incredible.
Example..
http://www.ghanabusinessnews.com/2012/03/23/ghana-blames-ivory-coasts-power-system-for-nation-wide-blackout/
The Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) has apologized for the loss of electrical power supply which occurred throughout the country on Wednesday, March 21 saying the cause of the power outage was as a result of loss of a generator in the Ivorian power system which is interconnected to the Ghana system.
GRIDCo observed that the loss of the generator led to a frequency decay and instability in the Ghana power system leading to the loss of all power generators in the country.
Now lets stop a second and analyse this. What The Ghana Grid Company Limited is saying is that a generator in another country has somehow led to the TOTAL shut down of the Ghanaian power Grid even as far as several hundred miles away on the other side of the country, a shocking declaration!
What are the national security implications of another country having the ability of entirely closing down your countries national grid??
How can it be possible that there be many power generation sites strewn across the Ghana as in any country and they be all at once subjected to failure??
This is unbelievably incredible incompetence if true, but what seems to be more worrying is if this is not true (and it most definitely smells very false) then what is? Certainly if the truth is worst than the lie then we can imagine something ongoing catastrophic in magnitude and of course totally illegal and damaging to Ghana.
What is blatantly clear is that none of the official explanations of these outages satisfy any of the educated people who are subjected to them, nor does it look like they will EVER solve the problem. Maybe it is a problem to big for Ghanaian engineers to handle or there is a covert willingness to perpetuate the problem for some underhanded illicit gain.
Either way if anyone is being honest they wouldn't be able to recommend any outside manufacturing investment in a country that has a systemic power failure PROGRAMME. Sadly poverty now in Ghana seems to be for the better part self inflicted.
i welcome your comments
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