Kwesi Pratt Jnr shared his experience on the power outages

Veteran journalist Kwesi Pratt Jnr has launched a scathing critique of the two major political parties, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), condemning what he describes as their politicisation of the country’s power challenges.

According to him, he nearly lost his house to a fire outbreak caused by the intermittent power outages locally referred to as dumsor.

Speaking on Metro TV on May 21, 2025, Kwesi Pratt stated that the situation could have been far worse had he not been at home when the incident occurred.

“Maybe I should not be talking about my own personal experiences. My house nearly got burnt as a result of these power outages two to three weeks ago and if I hadn't been in the house at the time (sic). So stop this blame game,” he recounted.

Pratt, Managing Editor of the Insight Newspaper, did not mince words in his criticism of the two parties, emphasising that the true victims of the power outages are babies in incubators, critically ill patients in hospitals, and ordinary Ghanaians who vote these parties into power with the hope of resolving such issues.

“Look, there are nursing mothers with infant babies who need special care and the baby's health suffer when there's no light. Think about them and the many poor people who buy food and stock them in their freezers and fridges, so that they can cope with this increasing cost of food and so on. Think about babies in incubators, think about all those scenarios and fix the problem and stop the unnecessary useless politicking with power outages,” he continued.

He further stated that the blame game between the two parties over which government is responsible for the power issues is unnecessary, describing their back-and-forth as “pointless and unproductive politicking.”

“You guys should just stop wasting our time. This semantic battle sometimes of who said this and how did he say it is all useless as far as I'm concerned. About one year before the New Patriotic Party left power, this country was suffering serious power outages. It has continued into the fifth month of the National Democratic Congress, that is the situation.”

He added, “And sometimes I wonder because these guys look us in the face and say, ‘oh, it is not dumsor.’ Do we care whether it is dumsor or you call it by another name? The point is that we are suffering from power outages. That's a fact. And in your time, you had the effrontery to look us in the eye and to tell us that, ‘oh, there's no dumsor in Ghana, what we have is dum siesie’. They were power outages."

"Right now, you have the National Democratic Congress in power and yesterday I was reading through the newspapers and some officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) were telling us that we don't have dumsor. I said, is this not exactly what the NPP was telling us? Do we care what you call it? We don't. Look, the people of Ghana have suffered enough. What the people of Ghana want is for you again, the politicians to fix the problems. The power outages are there,” he concluded.

Watch the video of Kwesi Pratt's submission below:

MAG/MA

After the heavy rains over the weekend, a lot of debris have been left across many parts of Accra. Watch some of the destructions below: