Nigeria has been accused of disrespecting its contractual agreement to supply Ghana with gas, thus worsening Ghana’s load shedding exercise, the Energy Ministry has said.

Since the inception of the West African Gas Pipeline Project, Nigeria, which is responsible for supplying Ghana, Togo and Benin with natural gas has proven to be unreliable, Communications Consultant at the Energy Ministry, Edward Bawa told Joy News.

Nigeria was supposed to send 123 million cubic feet of gas to Ghana but it is only able to supply around 49 cubic feet of gas.

“This is woefully inadequate to enable us to power our generating plants,” he remarked.

The penalty, for the entire contractual period, if Nigeria fails to meet the supply requirement is 20 million dollars, an amount Mr. Bawa said was not punitive enough.

“That is peanut to them so they don’t have incentive, especially when they have other thermal plants that are asking for gas, to supply Ghana the required quantities of gas. Simply they are just not respecting the contract,” he stated.

Since gas started flowing through the West African Gas Pipeline, “Nigeria has demonstrated that they can’t be relied upon to give us gas,” he underscored.

Meanwhile, the Ghana Grid Company, (GRIDCO) says it will have to reduce power supply to consumers further if Nigeria’s gas supply to the country continues to dwindle.

But Mr. Bawa said the Volta River Authority (VRA) is talking with other suppliers who will over the period see how they can give gas to Ghana, as the country’ awaits its own gas.

He is, therefore, asking consumers to be a “bit tolerant” with the power generators, explaining, “it takes a period to solve the problem”.  

For now, power producers, transporters and suppliers cannot tell when Ghana’s erratic power cuts will end.