ECG dismisses ‘dumsor’ fears amid outages

Residents of Kumasi who have been bracing for a return of Ghana’s infamous Dumsor crisis can stand down, at least according to the man running the country’s main power distribution company.

Electricity Company of Ghana Managing Director, Ing. Kwame Kpekpena, made that position clear during a visit to infrastructure sites in the Ashanti Region on April 23, telling JoyNews that the lights going out in Kumasi has nothing to do with how much electricity Ghana is producing.

“We are not experiencing load shedding because we have enough generation,” he said.

So what is the problem? Kpekpena points squarely at the pipes, not the water. Ghana may have the power, but ECG’s distribution network in Kumasi lacks the capacity to carry it all the way to homes and businesses. “We are not able to push the power we take from the transmission grid into the distribution network and into the communities,” he explained.

The city currently draws from just two Bulk Supply Points, the junctions where GRIDCo hands power over to ECG for local distribution. That infrastructure, Kpekpena says, is simply not enough for a growing city like Kumasi. A new link currently under construction between one of those points and the Airport substation is central to ECG’s fix. “If you have a problem there, we can supply them from the other BSP. So this link is very crucial for us and we are working to complete it,” he said.

A third supply point is being planned, though funding and coordination with government and GRIDCo mean no timeline can be promised yet.

When the network does get overwhelmed, automatic systems kick in and cut supply to parts of the city, something Kpekpena wants people to understand is categorically different from Dumsor. “Once in a while we have constraints in our ability to move the power to customers… when that happens, we need to take some people off,” he said.

The distinction matters enormously in Ghana, where the memory of the 2012 to 2016 outage crisis, which gutted businesses and upended daily life nationwide, remains raw. For now, ECG insists the situation is manageable and that the infrastructure work underway in Kumasi is aimed at making sure it stays that way.