‘Dumsor’ gave me sleepless nights – John Mahama confesses

Former President John Mahama has recounted moments in the office when things became hard for him as President in his bid to transform the lives of Ghanaians and end the energy crises

‘There are times things are tough and I experienced that. You called me ‘Mr. Dumsor’, we had a crippling energy crisis and I had sleepless nights because of the crises”, the former President disclosed in a re-streamed interview monitored by MyNewsGh.com on Ugandan Channel, NBS TV.

‘My Energy Minister and Finance Minister were the most stressed Ministers. There are times when I am working and thinking and suddenly something comes into my mind about how we can solve this problem and I take my phone and call my Energy Minister and Power Minister and there is no response and then ‘I look at my time and it’s 2 am…of course, that poor man must be asleep but ‘I forgot”, he recounted.

According to Mr. Mahama who is seeking another term in office to complete his eight-year mandate, ‘It is a tough job if you want to do a good job.’

According to him, he inherited the power crisis he took responsibility and fixed it.

“We had the Akosombo Dam. We thought Akosombo will last forever, unfortunately, it didn’t. So we were consuming like 2,600 megawatts and our production was 2,300 megawatts so we had to go through a period of outages. What did I do? I took responsibility.

“I didn’t blame previous governments. I said yes you call me ‘Mr. Dumsor’…I inherited this problem but I take responsibility because you voted me into power to take responsibility and fix things and so I said I’m going to fix this and by 2015 I had added an additional almost 3,000 megawatts to Ghana’s generation.”

“It can be a stressful office if you came for a transformation but some people fight for the office of the president just for the perks and enjoyment and the entitlement of it.”