Private legal practitioner Godlove Adjei Tenkorang has rejected claims by officials linked to the Energy Ministry that engineers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) in Kumasi are deliberately sabotaging the government, insisting that authorities must instead confront the structural causes behind the country’s persistent power outages.
Speaking on Angel FM in Kumasi, Tenkorang dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and unfair to technical workers. “No ECG engineer in Kumasi is sabotaging the government, so they should stop accusing them and rather look for the real issues and solve them,” he said.
The sabotage narrative gained traction after the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Ashanti Regional Chairman, Augustus Andrews Nana Kwasi, called on the Energy Minister to transfer engineers he alleged were appointed under the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration, claiming their presence was responsible for the frequency of outages in the region.
Tenkorang countered that framing, arguing the crisis is national in scope. “It is a national issue; it might just be rampant in the Ashanti Region, but other regions are equally facing power outages,” he said.
He warned against using political affiliation to judge professional performance, drawing a parallel to what he described as partisan conduct at the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). “The politicians should give us a break. They should stop politicising technocrats,” he said. “Who technocrats vote for does not affect their work, and as a matter of fact, we all have parties we vote for during elections.”
Tenkorang also highlighted the real economic cost of the outages, stating that he had personally lost two refrigerators to power surge damage within a single month. He noted that workers and businesses dependent on electricity were suffering significant losses, and criticised the pattern of outages falling in the evenings when residents return home from work.
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) in the Ashanti Region, following a meeting with ECG Ashanti Sub-Transmission officials, previously attributed the persistent outages to a combination of planned maintenance works and unanticipated technical faults within the power system, a position consistent with Tenkorang’s argument that the causes are structural rather than deliberate.
