John Dramani Mahama, the former president, has shown despondent that Ghanaians gave him the nickname “Mr Dumsor” – Mr power cut – in the peak of the power crisis during his term in office , indicating that it was as “unfair “.
“Dumsor” became famous in Ghana because of the “continuous, sporadic, and flighty electric blackout” when the National Democratic Congress (NDC) led by Mahama was in power. The circumstance prompted the collapse of numerous businesses.
Asked by Face Off host Samson Kasumba on Uganda-based NBS Television, whether the nickname was unfair , Mr John Dramani Mahama answered: “Definitely it was!”
“What you are alluding to is the genuine energy crisis Ghana went through, the real reason for the energy crisis was the absence of speculation throughout the long term by past states in age. Ghana’s utilization as far as power utilization had been ascending around 12% per annum.
“Be that as it may, the investment in additional generation had been extremely sluggish, so we got to a stage where we were requesting and consuming more power than we were creating. We had Akosombo Dam, we figured it will endure forever, tragically it didn’t,” Mahama said.
“Thus we were consuming like 2600 megawatts and our creation was 2300 megawatts, thus we needed to go through time of blackouts. Now how did I respond? I assumed responsibility, I didn’t fault past governments, I said ‘OK you call me Mr dumsor, I inherited this issue however I get a sense of ownership with it,’ thus I said ‘I will fix this’, by 2015 I had added extra 300 megawatts. I was really blamed for adding more megawatts,” he added.
Mahama said regardless of his work to add excess generation , Ghanaians are continuously encountering the “dumsor” time again under the current administration of President Akufo-Addo.