Middle East crisis exposes Ghana’s energy vulnerability — Expert urges urgent diversification
As missiles fly over the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical arteries for global oil transit, sits effectively closed amid escalating military exchanges between Israel, Iran, and the United States, an energy expert is using the moment to deliver a warning Ghana has been slow to heed: the country’s heavy dependence on fossil fuels leaves it dangerously exposed to shocks it has no power to prevent.
Lawyer and energy expert Lom-Nuku Ahlijah made the case on JoyNews AM on Monday, March 16, arguing that the current geopolitical crisis is not merely a distant drama but a live demonstration of exactly the kind of vulnerability Ghana needs to urgently address at home.
“It is true that a global economy is linked. Everything that is happening in other parts of the world has impacts in other places,” he said, framing Ghana’s energy challenge within a broader truth about interconnected global systems.
His point is not that Ghana can insulate itself entirely from international disruptions, even the world’s most isolated economies maintain some degree of external exposure, as he noted with a telling observation about North Korea’s trade relationships with Iran, Russia, and China. The question, rather, is what kind of domestic buffers a country builds to absorb the shocks it cannot prevent.
And on that front, Ahlijah’s assessment of Ghana’s current position is sobering.
Over the past decade, the country’s electricity generation mix has undergone a dramatic transformation, and not in a direction that reduces vulnerability. Thermal power, largely fueled by fossil fuels including gas, now accounts for roughly 80 percent of Ghana’s electricity generation. Hydroelectric power, which once dominated the mix, has been pushed down to approximately 20 percent. A decade ago, those proportions were broadly reversed.
“The same way that we’ve been able to move more towards a fossil fuel like gas means that we should also be thinking about how we can move to other alternative sources of energy as far as our country’s dependence on these things is concerned,” he said, acknowledging the progress made in stabilizing power supply while insisting that progress cannot be the end of the conversation.
Renewables, which might logically fill part of the gap, have so far failed to make a meaningful dent in the generation mix despite years of policy pronouncements and project announcements.
“We haven’t seen the impact. In the generation mix, we don’t have even anywhere close to five percent,” Ahlijah noted, a figure that stands as a pointed indictment of the distance between Ghana’s stated renewable energy ambitions and their actual realization.
The country’s nuclear energy aspirations tell a similar story of ambition outrunning achievement. Ghana’s nuclear energy journey began during President Kufuor’s administration in 2007 and has been carried forward by successive governments, yet nearly two decades later, a nuclear power plant remains a future aspiration rather than a present reality.
“We’ve talked about nuclear. We started our journey since 2007 during President Kufuor’s administration. Successive governments have continued, but we are still not there,” he said.
Ahlijah was careful to extend his analysis beyond energy alone, pointing to how international developments, from the war involving Ukraine to the current Middle East escalation, ripple into domestic fuel prices and supply chains in ways that Ghanaian consumers feel directly. He cited recent security disruptions in Burkina Faso as a nearby illustration of how quickly regional instability can compress into local economic pain.
His message to the government, framed around the Ministry of Energy’s expanded mandate for green transition, was direct and without diplomatic softening.
“My recommendation to this government is that we should begin to diversify the energy space in a more significant way,” he said. “So it’s not only about the buffer. The buffer is important, but we have a lot of things that we need to do.”
Ghana has adequate fuel stocks for now, the National Petroleum Authority confirmed as much just days ago. But adequacy in the present is not a substitute for resilience in the future. And as the Strait of Hormuz closure reminds the world, the future has a way of arriving faster than policy does.
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