Nearly a decade ago, Ghana introduced the Energy Sector Levies Act (ESLA) to tackle a growing debt crisis in the power sector. The law promised to stabilize the sector’s finances, clear legacy debts, and prevent a recurrence of the same issues. But 10 years on, the same structural cracks remain, and new taxes are being added to fix old problems.
For Duncan Amoah, Executive Secretary of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), the cycle is troubling. He believes the original purpose of ESLA has been quietly undermined by years of poor governance, mismanagement, and a lack of accountability in the power sector.
“ESLA should have resolved these problems, but it hasn’t,” he said bluntly during a discussion on the new fuel tax announced in May. He told The High Street Journal.
Amoah’s frustration stems not only from the re-emergence of sector debt, but also from what he sees as a failure to learn from the past. He explained that while ESLA generated billions of cedis over the years, those funds did little to change the sector’s trajectory. Instead, inefficiencies persisted, losses widened, and the burden of reform was passed back to consumers, again.
“After 10 years of paying ESLA, the consumer is still being asked to pay more, and this time with no clarity on where the new money is going,” he said.
Rather than doubling down on taxation, Amoah believes the conversation should shift toward structural reform. Transparency in how funds are used, clear targets for efficiency, and improved accountability in the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and other sector institutions, he said, are long overdue.
“If we don’t reflect on what ESLA was supposed to fix, we will just keep layering new levies without solving anything,” Amoah warned.
With a new fuel tax in place and public frustration growing, the question now is whether Ghana’s energy policymakers will revisit the lessons of ESLA, or repeat them.
