Ghana: Dumsor Returned With A Vengeance
Ghanaians will not easily forget July 28 & 29, 2026.
That was when the national grid collapsed completely, comprehensively, leaving flummoxed citizens scratching their heads in dismay, wondering why, after almost seventy years of independence (next year), their country can’t generate and distribute enough to power its domestic and paltry industrial base.
To find out what a gwan, I went to interview the Minister responsible for Power or lack of it.
Describing the Kasoa to Accra road as nightmarish is to be guilty of inadequate vocabulary. The condition of the country’s most important transportation artery, which also serves as Ghana’s stretch of the ECOWAS highway, is better imagined than described. Some parts were so cratered that they resembled one of those militarily attrited countries in West Asia.
But that is a story for another day.
The Ministry of Power itself was in total darkness.
Bumping into furniture and walls, the security man who looked like a retired military man led us around until we found the Minister presiding over the Ministry of Power, receiving visitors by the generous light of three emergency Chinese lamps, two rechargeable lanterns from Aba in Nigeria, and what I can only describe as raw ancestral faith.
Outside his window, a chorus of generators roared away like a herd of asthmatic lions, each one a small monument to the private electrification of a public failure.
Fuel dealers, especially those selling diesel, were, no doubt, popping champagne somewhere. Or they would have, if they could keep the champagne cold. They would certainly also be laughing at their banks.
“Welcome,” the Minister said, his dark Ashanti face glowing warmly, as though welcoming me into a well-lit, functioning nation. “I hope your journey was comfortable.”
“Thank you, Mr. Minister. It would have been magnificent,” I told him, “had your ministry not taken it upon itself to remind an entire country what life was like before Thomas Edison had his famous idea. You people are failing citizens big time.”
He chuckled, the practiced chuckles we see in people who have weathered many such encounters and lived to collect their salaries regardless. “We prefer to call it a temporary interruption,” he beamed, revealing perfect dental work good enough to drive dentists out of business.
Ah, “temporary interruption,” the great euphemism. The sturdy workhorse of African official bureaucratese. The cousin to “administrative delay” and “ongoing investigation.” When a whole nation sits in darkness for a whole day, “interruption” is not an adequate noun. At that point, darkness has not interrupted anything. Darkness, at that scale, deserves its own ministerial portfolio, its own budget line, possibly its own seat at Cabinet, since it clearly governs more effectively than some of the people drawing salaries to prevent it.
“Sir, when the whole of Ghana sits in the dark for a whole day, calling that an interruption is an understatement.
He shifted in his seat the way a man shifts when the chair has suddenly grown teeth.
“You journalists exaggerate,” he said, beaming.
…
Read the full article here: https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/ghana-dumsor-returned-with-a-vengeance
©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)
Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FemiAkomolafe
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