A Presidential Staffer and National Democratic Congress (NDC) communicator has attributed Ghana’s recent power outages to decades of underinvestment in electricity distribution infrastructure rather than any shortfall in generation capacity, urging the public to exercise patience as the government rolls out a transformer replacement programme.
Raymond Edem Tamakloe, speaking on JoyNews, said communities across the country have expanded far beyond the capacity of the transformers originally installed to serve them. “The population has tripled, but you have the same transformer that used to serve the area 20 years ago,” he said.
He explained that the resulting overload causes automatic shutdowns. “If a transformer is designed for 1,000 and now has to serve 3,000 households, it trips and shuts down by itself,” he stated.
Tamakloe said the government has begun procuring approximately 1,500 new transformers to address the problem. “We are fixing or installing about 1,500 of them so that we are able to meet demands,” he said, urging residents to bear with the temporary disruptions. “It is for their own long-term good so that our communities can be served.”
His remarks align with the position of both the presidency and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG). President John Dramani Mahama has disclosed that the government has procured approximately 2,500 transformers to replace ageing and overloaded units, noting that Ghana’s population has grown from around 18 million to over 33 million, placing enormous pressure on infrastructure that has not been upgraded to match.
ECG has also announced plans to install more than 900 transformers across the Ashanti Region alone by the end of 2026, as part of a broader GH¢3.46 billion national investment programme that includes the deployment of 2,500 distribution transformers to ease pressure on ageing networks.
President Mahama has repeatedly assured Ghanaians that the current outages do not represent a return to the prolonged electricity rationing era known as dumsor, describing the interruptions as planned and necessary steps toward long-term grid stability.
