The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG, which may also stand for Electricity Comes and Goes or Either Candle or Generator)
has become perhaps the country's most reviled public institution. To
make load-shedding a predictable exercise, they have issued a timetable
where residents are in one of three zones. Within a 36-hour period, for
12 hours, power is guaranteed, for 12 hours it will be off, and the
remaining 12 hours are dependent on the overall demand. The catch is
that the timetable is mostly unpredictable and neighbourhoods will go
for days on end without power. The ECG is also facing a massive deficit
for a logical reason: customers who do not receive electricity are not
likely to pay their bills.
The end result? People make do, but any business requiring
access to electricity (from internet cafes to cold stores) either have
to shut down, or pony up for a generator and burn ridiculous amounts of
diesel. Incidentally, two of the biggest businesses are selling
overpriced generators and phone-charging services.
For larger businesses, the stakes are even higher: if a
factory does not have regular power and cannot afford an
industrial-sized generator, it simply shuts down and tells its employees to go home, reducing productivity to a fraction. Even the biggest companies are affected. So the economy is
starting to slow down.
Like many relatively affluent residents, Mr. and Mrs. O
have access to a generator, which has shielded them from the worst
effects of dumsor. The hum of the generator in the yard (and neighbors'
yards) has become a fact of life, as is the smell of burning diesel. In
less than two years, Mr. O has gone from being a recycling,
bike-commuting eco-hippie to a near-constant consumer of fossil fuels -
one could say he has cashed in his lifetime of carbon credits.
But the alternative is worse: the 1% of Ghana live very
much in a gilded cage: high walls, razor wire, guards, etc. Take
electricity out of the equation, and it becomes a gilded sarcophagus.
Quite simply, the infrastructure prepared for Accra's elite requires a
lot of resources. Not only do westerners consume more imported
non-recyclable goods and rely on private transportation, but even the
houses built for them are wasteful.
In the case of Mr. and Mrs. O, their delightful temporary
home is a giant concrete box that is completely inappropriate for the
climate: it directly absorbs the equatorial sun, has no natural
ventilation (no cross-breezes), and every room requires its own air
conditioner. Back home, an AC unit was something installed in the
bedroom before a heatwave; here it is an essential item in any inhabited
room.
So when the generator fails and the repair guy is slow to
arrive, things get hot and sticky in the house. The water pump is also
electricity-dependent, so when power fails, best to fill the buckets
with the remaining water pressure. At the university, a night without
power was an inconvenience; now, a nightmare.
To keep things in perspective, even having a generator that works most of the time is a
great privilege. So enjoy the AC, don't mind the humming and get used to
the smell.
On the upside, Ghanaians keep a good sense of humour through it all. For example, here is an explanation of how dumsor happens.
