News:
April 28, 2026
Ghana’s Minority in Parliament has squarely blamed the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government for the return of debilitating power outages, rejecting official claims that the crisis stems from a specific incident at the Akosombo Dam.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the Minority – led by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) – declared that the nationwide blackouts, which millions of Ghanaians have endured since January 2025, are the result of “fourteen months of policy failure, institutional neglect, and deliberate abandonment” of the energy sector. The lawmakers insisted that the government must not be allowed to use the events of 23 April 2026 as an “alibi” for a crisis that long predates any single event.
The opposition detailed that long before 23 April, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) had been issuing relentless emergency schedules, its Director-General had publicly apologised for chronic power fluctuations damaging household appliances, and communities were experiencing outages lasting days, not hours.
The NPP Minority directly quoted President John Mahama’s 19 April statement, in which he described the disruptions as “necessary steps to ensure a more reliable and stable power supply,” and argued that Ghanaians had rejected that explanation from the start.
Crucially, the Minority accused the Mahama administration of inheriting and then abandoning a comprehensive roadmap – the Energy Sector Recovery Programme (ESRP) – negotiated with the IMF under the previous NPP government.
They noted that the ESRP was designed to address a projected $2.2 billion shortfall and tackle ECG’s distribution losses exceeding 25%. “If the lights were on when the NPP handed over power, and the lights are off now, who turned them off?” the lawmakers asked, pointing out that Ghana’s installed capacity of over 5,200 megawatts exceeds peak demand, making the crisis fundamentally a financial and managerial failure.
The Minority vowed to challenge any attempt by the government to rewrite history, rejecting what they called a “cynical” narrative that the power crisis began only with the Akosombo incident. The government has yet to issue a detailed response to the opposition’s specific claims, but President Mahama previously characterised the outages as temporary upgrades rather than a return of “dumsor.”
Ghanamps.com