The Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) has highlighted the urgent need to address revenue leakages in the power distribution sector in order to reduce Ghana’s growing energy debt, which is currently estimated at $3 billion.
Kojo Yaotse, ACEP’s Policy Lead for Petroleum and Conventional Energy, pointed to the lack of accountability among government-owned utility companies as a major factor contributing to the financial strain.
He stressed the importance of involving an independent third-party entity to oversee electricity distribution operations.
” When you impose taxes at the entry point, you increase the cost of production and cost of doing things. It will show up in your productive cost base. So a lot of the taxes have been imposed at that end, and that is not helpful. And then also once we do that, let’s see the linkages within the local economy. Some of the things that we are importing and we are asking for waivers and the rest of them.”
” How do we empower the technical universities here in USC and the rest of them? It is possible that if we look hard enough, we’ll begin to also produce some of these things low hanging fruit. You see a big disconnect between the technical education and then this value chain and the rest of them.
So I agree with some of the revisions to the task that we need to do. Look, some people prefer to even go and clear their rules in Togo or Kodivwa simply because of taxes and reports in the rest,”
