On Saturday, President Mahama announced the setting up of a new Ministry of Power and also appointed the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Energy, Dr Kwabena Donkor as its Minister.
According to them, the new Ministry only seeks to create “job for the boys.”
The decision, he said, forms part of measures to restructure the power sector and ensure consistent power supply.
The New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) Member of Parliament K. T. Hammond in an interview with Citi News described the move as a “fire fighting approach.”
K. T. Hammond who also doubles as the Minority spokesperson on Energy said it is a “knee jerk reaction to the problem that we have and really, the solution to this dismountable problem that we have now has nothing to do with splitting up Ministries.”
He insisted that the energy challenges persist due to government’s failure to provide adequate funding for the Volta River Authority (VRA) to purchase crude oil for energy production.
The Adansi Fomena Member of Parliament (MP) served notice that when the NPP is voted to govern the nation in 2016, “we will put the two back and create the same Ministry of Energy.”
The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) also described the action as needless.
The Party’s General Secretary, Kofi Asamoah Siaw told Citi News, the nation has too many Ministries with some “performing duplicated duties so to see another Ministry at this stage is an unnecessary venture.”
According to him, the newly created Power Ministry will only “introduce another bureaucratic bottleneck that will create difficulties in the delivery processes.”
Mr. Asamoah Siaw pointed out that the cause of the power crisis is generation capacity therefore, “to say that it is another Ministry that will come and solve that problem is unnecessary and the President needn’t do that.”
“It’s another way of creating job for the boys and it will become a white elephant” adding that Parliament should consider the national interest by refusing to approve “the proposal from the
