BUSINESS OWNERS UNHAPPY WITH POWER OUTAGES

…plans to lay off workers

Small and medium scale enterprises in Accra are up in arms against the Ghana Grid Company Limited, (GRIDCO] over recent load shedding exercise currently underway saying, “the power outages will have an adverse impact on their businesses”.

According to them, business activities have already started declining after the December general elections and the rationing exercise will aggravate their problems, warning that if care was not taken, some of them will be forced to send some of their workers home.

Mr. Clement Asiedu, is the owner of fresh water enterprise, producers of Holy-Holy sachet water in Accra and has almost 15 permanent workers with10 additional casual workers.

He told theghanaianjournal.com that, his company was faced with serious financial difficulties and can not afford a generator to produce the amount the number of sachet water that they would have ordinarily produced.
According to him, upon hearing the news, he quickly organized a meeting to inform his casual workers about the latest development, hinting them of their possible dismissal.

“We may not be able to produce the amount of sachet water that we normally produce, so the most appropriate thing for me to do is to let some of them sit at home for the mean time and call them after things were normalized”, Mr. Asiedu submitted to this reporter.
Others who also spoke to the paper deeply registered their displeasure about t the situation, calling on GRIDco to quickly rectify the situation before it eventually get out of hand.

They were quick to lambast authorities for their inability to detect the fault earlier only to come out to announce interruptions in power supply.
“These people some times take us for granted. They know no body can take them on so they do whatever they like”, a mobile phone dealer told this reporter in Accra yesterday, when we sought to find his views on the matter.
However, some news paper publishers that the paper spoke to also lamented on the matter pointing out that, the interruptions will badly affect the number of times their papers appear on the news stands.
Some of them also told this reporter that they can not afford stand-by generators and that they shall come –out at a time they have power.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tony Oteng Gyasi has decried the power rationing exercise currently taking place in some parts of the country saying, “How can we afford to ration electricity power at a time the world is face with serious economic crunch”.
To him, it high time the nation drew a proper energy policy, to enable us know where exactly we will be heading towards in the next decade as far as energy was concerned.

He said, the power outages will force many companies to lay off some of their workers they would not be in a position to pay their salaries for the next two moths because, profits shall fall drastically.
It will be recalled that Grid Company Limited announced that one of its transformers at the Achimota Bulk Supply Point {BSP} has become faulty, and therefore was going to be power interruption.