Do You Have Lights?

A description of life in Ghana and how people adapt to a situation during the load shedding and powercuts due to the failure of the Akosombo Dam, the largest powers source, to produce power. This has been going on from November 2006 until today. We see no end to this.

I was in Ghana and one of things I experienced were the power cuts. Technical reasons were given from above and we had to grin and bear it.

We had 12 hours off during the day and 12 hours off during the night on alternate days sometimes every two days. Now I hear its going to 24 hours off at a time every two days. The common phrase now is “do you have lights?”.

Most people have an electricity schedule stuck up somewhere in their house or office but it is not always accurate. The official term for this is “Load Shedding” but when the lights go out unexpectedly on your day on it is called “Lights Off”. We call each other and ask is it load shedding or lights out… Now we all rush to do ironing, cooking, emailing and anything that uses electricity before the load shedding and its funny to see people rushing home cos lights will come on at 6pm.

My question is… with all the sunshine why isn’t solar made more available to the country? Why hasn’t someone found a way to make [tag-tec]solar panels[/tag-tec] cheaper for all to be able to afford them and why hasn’t the government had the foresight to see that the levels of the dam were dropping over the past years, so something should be done fast. It is human nature at its worst, wait until the crisis before reacting rather than preventing the crisis to happen in the first place

To Solar or not to [tag]solar[/tag]… that is the question

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