The minority in Parliament has officially dismissed government claims connecting Ghana’s energy instability to the April 23 Akosombo fire.
They contend that the persistent outages, known as “Dumsor”, actually commenced in January 2025 during the Mahama administration.
Hon. Collins Adomako-Mensah, the Member of Parliament for Afigya Kwabre North and Deputy Ranking Member on the Energy Committee, warned against what he termed “a cynical rewriting of history” while speaking to the media at a press conference on Tuesday, April 28, 2026.
“And without qualification: Ghana’s power crisis, the Dumsor that millions of Ghanaians have been enduring since January 2025, was not caused by any accident at Akosombo. It was caused by this government,” he stated.
Adomako-Mensah argued that the fire was merely a visible sign of a sector that had already deteriorated due to mismanagement.
“The events of 23rd April are the latest and most dramatic symptom of a power sector left to decay under the NDC’s incompetent stewardship. The Mahama government must not be permitted to use this incident as a convenient alibi for a crisis that predates it by more than a year.”
The Deputy Ranking Member emphasised that blackouts were already a nationwide reality long before the Akosombo incident. “Let us be unequivocal about the timeline. Long before the event of 23rd April 2026, Ghanaians across every region of this country had been enduring persistent, unannounced and devastating power outages.”
He pointed out that the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) had spent much of April 2026 releasing emergency maintenance schedules.
Furthermore, he reminded the public that the ECG Director General had previously apologised for the fluctuations that were destroying household appliances and undermining small businesses.
The minority described a pre-fire landscape where communities faced days of darkness, industries suffered financial losses, and hospitals relied heavily on backup generators.
Adomako-Mensah insisted that the government must take full responsibility for this pre-existing decline.
To support his assertions of this timeline, he cited President Mahama’s own remarks made on April 19, nearly a week before the fire occurred.
“On 19th April 2026, four days before the Akosombo incident, President Mahama stood before the Ghanaian people and declared the outages you are facing are not Dumsor. He described the disruptions as necessary steps to ensure a more reliable and stable power supply.”
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
