The Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) has welcomed the nomination of John Jinapor as the Minister for Energy-designate.
ACEP has urged the incoming minister to prioritize reducing political interference in the management of the energy sector.
Kodzo Yaotse, ACEP’s Policy Lead for Petroleum and Conventional Energy, stressed the importance of adopting strategic and non-partisan approaches to tackle the challenges facing the sector.
“The Honorable Jinapor minister-designate for Energy has been within the space for a long while now serving as deputy minister within the same ministry and also in the 8th parliament, as the ranking on energy on the Mines and Energy committee, so he is someone that understands the space well.
He has been at the forefront of some of the advocacy on the things that needs to be done are to correct the issues within the energy sector in the recent past,” Kodzo asserted.
“He is inheriting a power sector that is crippling under debt, power sector where the state’s owned enterprises also quickly under debt making significant losses, power sector or an energy sector where the petroleum sector is almost dying because we’ve not been able to bring on board any new fields to augment our current production.
” So he has a tall list of things that he has to quickly tackle to bring reforms and, of course there are a wide array of stakeholders that have ideas on how some of these problems can be fixed.
If he is able to lessen, and consult more with these stakeholders on the strategies to move forward and also if he is able to a large extent limit the influence of politics in the management of the sector, especially, do away with the arbitrary regulation that we’ve seen in the recent past and make sure that the laws and the signs of regulating the energy sector are followed, then he should have a successful tenure in this space,” He added.
