Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Ghana’s capital Accra, on Saturday, June 8, to demand an end to chronic power outages in the country.
Rallied by local celebrities, the protesters demanded that the government address the matter urgently to cushion Ghanaians and businesses from incurring blackout-attributed losses.
Dressed in black clothes and carrying placards saying ‘Stop Dumsor’, the protesters caused traffic congestion as they marched through the streets of the capital. Some carried kerosene lanterns to symbolize their daily struggles.
In Ghana, dumsor is a persistent, irregular, and unpredictable electric power outage.
According to the local power regulator, the outages are due to overloaded transformers, but experts partly blame it on the country’s inability to pay private power suppliers.
Electricity woes have become constant news events in the West African nation for months now.
In February, the state power utility briefly cut off power supplies to the parliament building in an effort to push the legislature to honour its 23 million Ghanaian cedi ($1.8 million) debt.
To address the issue, the Ghanaian government has been seeking to restructure the power sector and seal a deal with independent power producers (IPP).
