Small and medium business owners who use electricity for their operations are beginning to feel the impact of the intensified twenty-four hour load shedding that commenced last week.
The load shedding got worse after the Ghana Gas Company stopped processing and supplying gas to the Aboadze Thermal Plant to allow engineers tie-in an AMERI Plant to some VRA facilities in the Aboadze power enclave.
The development is beginning to bite hard on some business owners who lament over the adverse effect of the new load shedding on their activities.
“The extension of the dumsor to 24-hours is crippling our businesses. I have to increase the fuel I buy for my generator in order to do business”, a forex bureau operator in Achimota, Emmanuel Asumming told the Business Day.
Other business owners around the Kwame Nkrumah Circle who mainly operate mobile phone shops also decried the development, describing it as a setback to businesses in the country.
“With the phone business, you need reliable electricity to function properly, without it you can’t work”, a shop owner lamented, adding that “we have been buying twelve gallons of petrol a week to operate our generator”.
The Power Ministry has however, assured that electricity supply would be improved after the completion of the tie-in works, which is expected to add 250MW to the original 500MW.
According to the think tank Economy of Ghana Network (EGN), Ghana loses more than $2 million daily and $686 million annually due to the power crisis.
On a monthly basis, the nation is said to lose more than $57 million, which translates into an annual loss of two per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
EGN’s study, which was conducted in 2015 to assess the impact of the power rationing on micro and small-scale enterprises also established that the annual sales of companies had been lowered by about 37 to 48 per cent.
The study further showed that out of the 1,250 MSEs surveyed across the 10 regions of the country, only 20 per cent had back-up generating sets to augment power supply to their businesses.
According to the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), more than four million MSEs provide two-thirds of all jobs in the country.
The World Bank in 2013 also established that power crisis was the second most important constraint to the activities of firms.
