Commercial lawyer Amanda Akuokor Clinton has urged authorities to treat Ghana’s ongoing electricity disruptions as an immediate economic emergency, arguing that recurring outages are destroying the livelihoods of small-scale traders faster than any policy debate can address them.
Clinton, Founding Partner of Clinton Consultancy and a barrister called to the Bar in both England and Wales and Ghana, made the remarks as public frustration deepens over intermittent power supply across the country. The outages, which intensified after a fire at the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) Akosombo Substation Switchyard on April 23, have disrupted supply across multiple regions, with communities reporting blackouts significantly exceeding official schedules.
Her intervention centred on the gap between government communications and the daily realities faced by informal sector workers who lack the resources to absorb repeated power disruptions.
“The average woman who is selling fish in her freezer, and the light goes off for three days in Kumasi, cares more about how government is going to address that immediately,” she said.
Clinton used the image of a fish trader watching her refrigerated stock perish during prolonged outages to illustrate the concrete financial damage that statistical assurances and infrastructure timelines fail to capture. She argued that the lived cost of each blackout accumulates in ways that national figures do not reflect and that ordinary traders, particularly women in the informal economy, bear the heaviest burden.
She also challenged what she described as misplaced priorities in public discourse, calling for domestic infrastructure challenges to receive the sustained attention they deserve over external political concerns. “Ghanaians care more about you addressing our Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) problem,” she said, adding that reform of the system, whether through executive action or legislative change, needed to happen without further delay.
The government has maintained that current disruptions do not amount to a return of the prolonged power crisis known as dumsor, with President John Dramani Mahama describing recent outages as part of a deliberate upgrade programme. The Ministry of Energy and Green Transition has outlined an 18-month intervention plan estimated at a minimum of GH¢4 billion, incorporating transformer replacements, substation upgrades, and drone-based fault detection across the national grid.
Despite those assurances, outages have continued to draw criticism from businesses and households across the Ashanti, Greater Accra, and other regions, with sectors dependent on constant power supply, including food preservation, retail, and small-scale manufacturing, reporting sustained losses.
