Ghanaians are confronting a question many hoped had been settled years ago: Are power outages back for good? In recent weeks, recurring electricity cuts have disrupted households and businesses across the country, reviving memories of the prolonged “dumsor” crisis that weighed heavily on the economy between 2012 and 2015.
The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has issued load-shedding timetables in several regions, with outages in some areas stretching up to eight hours. From Greater Accra to Ashanti and the Western Region, the pattern is becoming difficult to ignore.
The consequences are immediate and measurable for businesses. Reliable electricity is not a convenience; it is a core production input. When power goes off, assembly lines stall, perishable goods spoil, and labour sits idle. The result is lost revenue, rising operating costs, and, for smaller firms, an existential threat.
Government officials, however, have resisted comparisons to the dumsor era. Speaking during his “Resetting Ghana” tour on April 19, President John Dramani Mahama argued that the current outages reflect a structured effort to rehabilitate ageing infrastructure rather than a systemic failure of power generation. At the centre of this effort is the installation of 2,500 transformers under the first phase of a broader national upgrade programme.
The Ministry of Energy and Green Transition has outlined an 18-month intervention plan estimated at no less than GH¢4 billion. The programme is expected to unfold in four phases, beginning with a short-term emergency response and culminating in major upgrades to backbone infrastructure, including 33-kilovolt feeders and regional distribution systems. The intention is clear: improve long-term reliability, even if it requires short-term disruption.
ECG’s Acting Managing Director, Ing. Kwame Kpekpena, acknowledged the strain this has placed on consumers, issuing an apology for lapses in communication and response times. He indicated that restoring reliability has become the utility’s top operational priority. The Ministry has also signalled a shift toward more technology-driven management of the grid, including the deployment of drones to detect faults and monitor network performance.
Yet for many in the private sector, these assurances offer limited comfort. The distinction between “planned maintenance” and “dumsor” is largely semantic when outages are frequent, prolonged, and geographically widespread. The economic effects are functionally similar. During the previous crisis, power instability was estimated to shave between one and two percentage points off Ghana’s annual GDP growth. Small and medium-sized enterprises bore the brunt, often lacking the capital to sustain generator use or absorb repeated production losses.
The more pressing issue, therefore, is not simply whether the current situation qualifies as dumsor, but whether the approach to infrastructure upgrades is imposing disproportionate costs on businesses. Modernisation is necessary, but its execution matters. Without careful planning, the burden of transition risks is transferred directly to the private sector through lost productivity and increased operating expenses.
There are practical ways to mitigate this. Advance notice systems must move beyond ad hoc announcements and become reliable planning tools. Industrial and commercial users should receive outage schedules well in advance, ideally weeks rather than days, to allow sufficient time to adjust operations and plan production schedules effectively. There is also a case for structured support mechanisms, such as a business continuity fund or targeted insurance schemes, to cushion smaller firms against disruptions tied to national infrastructure projects.
Execution discipline will be the deciding factor in whether the current intervention delivers its intended benefits. The four-phase upgrade plan hinges on clear milestones and timelines and carries the potential to significantly reduce both planned and unplanned outages. Investments in smart metering, targeted at one million installations, and drone-based monitoring could introduce the kind of system intelligence needed to prevent local faults from escalating into wider blackouts.
Still, Ghana’s energy sector has seen ambitious plans before. The credibility of the current programme will depend less on its design and more on its delivery.
In strict technical terms, the government may be right: this is not a return to the dumsor of a decade ago. Generation capacity has improved, and the underlying challenge is different. But for the cold storage operator in Kumasi or the factory owner in Tema, those distinctions offer little reassurance. What matters is consistency.
