Representatives of the Greater Accra Chapter of the Ghana Hairdressers and Beauticians Association on Thursday expressed their frustration about the energy crisis and how it is affecting their businesses at a forum in Accra.
The forum, organized by the Economy of Ghana Network (EGN) on the theme: "The Electricity Insecurity and its Impact on the Economy of Ghana" brought participants from non-governmental organizations, Civil Society organizations, owners of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, Technical Persons the Academia.
Mrs Tina Offei Yirenkyi, Head of the Accra branch of the Association wondered if the crisis was going to be resolved.
"Is anybody really listening”, she wondered because she had been engaged in several of such meetings but there has been very low response from government insisting, “what we want is the power,"
Mrs Yirenkyi said her association had written proposals and petitions to many government institutions, including the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, the Ministry of Power, the Volta River Authority, among others but had not received any response.
"It seems that nobody is really ready to sit down and dialogue with us as an Association but this dumsor is really affecting us, it is affecting our businesses, it is affecting our homes," she said drawing some applause from the participants.
She urged government to be quick about fixing the problem, since it was really taking a heavy toll on their jobs.
Dr Charles Ackah, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) noted labour productivity, employment and many other economic ventures were affected by insecurity caused by the low electricity supply.
Dr Ackah said from a simple on the back of envelope calculation of the adverse effect on electricity outages, it could be estimated that the nation could be losing 2.2 million dollars per day due to the electricity crises alone.
Mr Ishmael Ackah, Head of Policy Unity at the African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) in a presentation said Ghana needed about four billion cedis over a period of 10 years to be able to stabilise the energy situation.
He said the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) owed the VRA about one Billion cedis, GRIDCo about 100 million cedis and Asogli about 21 million dollars.
Mr Ackah said the total amount of money owed by the ECG meant the government of Ghana owed the ECG about 62 percent and called for immediate, medium and long term solutions to address the power challenges.