Following the announcement by officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana that the intermittent power outages being experienced in the Ashanti Region may not end anytime soon, some inhabitants and business operators in the region have called for a load shedding timetable.
According to them, the unannounced power fluctuations have been causing damages to their offices and household equipment.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Grid Company, (GRIDCo), Jonathan Amoako- Baah in a recent visit to the region attributed the erratic power cuts to a planned nationwide maintenance exercise being carried out by his outfit.
While GRIDCo says the nationwide intermittent power outages are expected to be over in September, ECG officials on the other hand say the outages in the Ashanti Region will likely end in December.
Some inhabitants in the region say the power fluctuations have badly affected them and have thus called on authorities to release a load shedding timetable.
“As a matter of fact, we are in a very difficult situation. For instance, on Sunday, the light went off around 6:30 am. The lights came back at 3 pm. It went off shortly after that, and we had lights at 4 pm and the lights went off again between 9 and 10 pm. We never had light until around 5 am the next day. We have indeed been suffocating because of the heat. We want the President to know that we are suffering. The same thing happens when we come to work at Asafo. Last week Monday, the lights were out throughout the day. We were unable to work, so we had to return to our homes. We are appealing to the government that if indeed we are in the era of power outages again, they should just tell us and issue a load-shedding timetable, so we can prepare ahead of time,” a resident of Atonsu, Nana Mensah lamented.
Business operators who use electricity on a daily basis say they are among those who have been worst affected.
They believe getting a load-shedding timetable will help them plan their activities ahead of time and will ensure they don’t incur losses due to damages to their equipment.
“For those of us into the printing business, we were already affected even before the power fluctuations began. It has become worse now. Our equipment are always affected when the lights go off. My motor has become faulty because of the frequent power outages. We called an engineer to fix it, but he says we would have to buy a new motor. We are just managing to work with it in the interim, but it is not as effective as it was. Getting a load-shedding timetable will really be of help to us. In that case, we will be aware well ahead of time, so we can plan our activities,” Nana Yaw Krampah, a printing press operator stated.
“Our machines are getting damaged all the time. The frequent fluctuations have led to destruction to our equipment. Some printing presses have even caught fire in the process. Even if there would be power outages for some time, we are pleading with authorities to kindly get us a timetable, so we can put our machines off before the power outages. This has indeed affected our printing business badly,” another printing press operator, Kofi Nuako added.
