Ghana’s Public Utility Workers’ Union (PUWU) has formally condemned what it describes as a dangerous pattern of public threats against workers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), warning that accusations of deliberate sabotage are not only false but are putting field staff at physical risk.
In a statement dated Monday, April 27, the union said it had observed public officials threatening ECG employees with transfers and dismissals over ongoing power disruptions, and that some workers had been named publicly as saboteurs in certain regions, particularly in the Western Region, without any supporting evidence.
“The calling of names of some staff as saboteurs of the government without any evidence exposes these staff to attacks and public ridicule,” PUWU said, warning that such actions undermine the willingness of technicians to respond to faults in communities around the clock.
The union insisted that the current outages are the product of long-standing structural failures, not worker misconduct. It pointed to chronic shortages of transformers, poles and cables, an overstretched distribution network, and years of underinvestment in transmission infrastructure. In the Ashanti Region, it noted that electricity demand has exceeded the capacity of existing bulk supply points, while the Volta and Oti Regions are contending with ageing transmission lines that cause voltage fluctuations during peak periods.
The statement came as frustration over the outages spread across multiple sectors. Akuapim North Member of Parliament Sammi Awuku made an urgent public appeal to President John Dramani Mahama and the Minister of Energy and Green Transition, John Abdulai Jinapor, to stabilise supply during examination season, noting that West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) practical papers began on April 21, with Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates due to start on May 4.
The human cost was made vivid in a separate account by Michael Acheampong, a poultry farmer who called into a breakfast radio programme on Monday to describe losing 341 birds during a single overnight blackout. He said the birds panicked in the darkness, crowded together, and trampled one another. Acheampong, who keeps around 9,000 birds, said this was not his first such loss and urged the public to understand that the impact on small agricultural businesses is real and direct.
Political voices across the spectrum converged on the same diagnosis. Collins Adomako-Mensah, deputy ranking member on Parliament’s Energy Committee, said the crisis reflects a fundamental imbalance between generation capacity, which has grown through private independent power producers, and transmission infrastructure managed by the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo), which has not kept pace. He said GRIDCo requires an estimated $250 million to upgrade transmission lines, particularly from the Volta Region northward, and called on government to publish a load-shedding timetable to help households and businesses plan.
Andrews Appiah-Danquah, spokesperson for the United Party (UP), framed the problem in similarly structural terms, pointing to the Energy Sector Recovery Programme (ESRP) introduced in 2018 as a blueprint that was never fully executed. “If we had implemented the ESRP, we shouldn’t be having this discussion,” he said, describing the situation as a failure of infrastructure, finance and governance rather than a conventional outage problem.
Presidential communicator Raymond Edem Tamakloe acknowledged public frustration and conceded that communication before outages had been inadequate, saying government is intensifying efforts to relay information more quickly through social media and other channels.
