Dum-so has been banished -VRA CEO

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Volta River Authority (VRA), Mr Emmanuel Antwi-Dankwa, has given the assurance that the country will not experience any erratic power outages.

He said power outages, also known as “dum-so”, is a thing of the past and not something the country will return to again.

“‘Dum-so’ is something of the past, I can tell you for a fact. It’s not something I am hopeful we will come back to again. For us, engineers, it is a blot on our conscience anytime there is dum-so. I mean you can’t sit in VRA and have dum-sr in Ghana.”

Mr Antwi-Dankwa’s comments were based on fears being expressed by a session of Ghanaians that the power distributors’ indebtedness to the Authority could take Ghana back to the era of “dum-so”.

The country has, for the past weeks, been experiencing power outages to the extent that a timetable had been drawn for some regions. The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) released a timetable for areas in parts of Accra.

They included Airport Residential Area, Mamoobi, Accra Girls, ECG Roman Ridge District office, Kotobabi Polyclinic and Alajo. According to the ECG, the power cuts were to enable a contractor to commence excavation works to interconnect the Pokuase Bulk Supply Point to the Kanda and Airport substations.

The ECG said the work forms part of its financial and operational turnaround project in collaboration with the Millennium Development Authority. Aside Accra, the ECG approved the Ghana Grid Company’s (GRIDCo) request to put out a power rationing timetable in some parts of the Volta and Oti regions to enable it to work on its machines.

The move, according to GRIDCo, is to enable it to undertake repair works on transformers supplying the two regions. Despite the good reasons given for these outages, some Ghanaians believed that the indebtedness of the power distributers to the VRA could cause the country to go back to “dum-so”.

But addressing the media at Nkwakubew Presby School, where the VRA made a Special Drone Delivery Donation of Educational and Covid-19 materials to the school as part of activities to mark its 60th anniversary, Mr Antwi-Dankwa said: “Don’t be carried away by anything about us going broke and for which reasons there will be ‘dum-so.”

The VRA boss confirmed that, indeed, the company made some loses in 2016, but they were making profits now, so they can’t be owed to the extent of throwing the whole country into “dum-so”.

“What I can tell you for a fact is that from a position of a loss of 1.3 billion in 2016, in 2020 we made a profit. This can’t be an organisation that owes so much and will be on its knees.” He said that soon the Authority will publish its financial statements for Ghanaians to know the state of the company.

Meanwhile, the company, as part of its 60th anniversary, donated learning materials and Covid-19 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to schools in its catchment areas.

The post Dum-so has been banished -VRA CEO appeared first on The Chronicle Online.

Read Full Story