Minister of Energy, Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has become the talk of town, following his comments on rolling power outages. He is not a stranger to controversial takes on major national issues, with previous comments in the education sector and during a natural disaster ‘under his belt.’ Produce dumsor timetable if it exists
In his recent controversial take, NAPO, as he is referred to, has denied that Ghana was experiencing ‘dumsor’ that is, outages that warrant the publishing of a timetable by the power distributor, the Electricity Company of Ghana.
He told journalists over the weekend: “Ask those who want it to bring it, if there is. I haven’t seen any timetable.” NAPO had earlier denied that the country has returned to the days of dumsor, as the erratic power supply in the country under John Dramani Mahama was referred to.
“If we are comparing four years, four years, NPP administration energy sector is 300 times better than John Mahama… it’s far much better than John Mahama ever did… “I’ve promised you that we are going to work on it and it’s not a work that is a single event; it’s a process, and we’ll continue to work on it for the energy sector to become better,” he stated.
Toilets in SHS – 2017
While addressing the issue of lack of toilets in some Senior High Schools, the then education minister, in 2017 mentioned that students defecating in rubber bags is at “least better”. At a news conference in Accra on Thursday, November 30, 2017, Dr. Opoku Prempeh answering a question on lack of toilet facilities in some schools under the Free SHS education policy said: “There are few schools still in Ghana here that are secondary schools who had no toilets; that is not the result of free SHS. So when you see students portraying that somebody says I do it in a rubber bag and I walk 45 minutes, at least you have the rubber bag,” he said, which comments drew critique from the public.
Keta tidal waves comment greeted with backlash – December 2021
MP for Ketu South, Abla Dzifa Gomashie accused NAPO, now energy minister of making bigoted and tribalistic comments relative to the Keta tidal waves disaster. In an interview on Asempa, the minister who serves as Manhyia South MP, indicated that there’s no need for government to make allocations for victims of the Keta tidal waves in the 2022 Budget. According to him, citizens across the country get struck by natural disasters where no specific intervention is availed to them from the central government. This was at a time opposition MPs were pushing for budgetary allocation to victims of tidal waves in Keta. “How can you the opposition tell me that I should include funding for construction of Keta sea defence in the budget? Was there budgetary allocation for Kumasi flooding? If Finance Minister includes it, I’ll also lead the Kumasi residents to demonstrate”, Dr. Opoku Prempeh fumed.
Source: ghanaweb.com
