- Ghana Energy Minister orders GRIDCo Chief to Step Aside as Power Disruptions Trigger Scrutiny
Ghana’s Minister for Energy and Green Transition, Dr. John Abdulai Jinapor, has asked the Chief Executive of the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) to step aside pending investigations into a fire incident at the Akosombo power control centre, as the government moves to contain rising public anger over a cascade of power disruptions across multiple regions.
The directive comes ahead of a major briefing scheduled for 2pm today Monday, April 27, 2026, which government spokesperson Felix Ofosu Kwakye said would address recent developments in electricity distribution, including actions being taken by the ministry and power sector agencies.
The move signals a sharper accountability posture by the new administration at a time when households and businesses say outages have become both more frequent and less predictable and when officials are facing intensifying questions about whether recent failures reflect routine system fragility, deferred maintenance, or deeper operational breakdowns.
In recent weeks, a series of incidents has hit the electricity system, affecting transmission and distribution infrastructure. These have included a transformer upgrade at the Teshie–Nungua primary substation, a technical challenge linked to a GRIDCo line at Asiekpe BSP affecting the Volta and Oti regions, and a fire outbreak at GRIDCo’s Akosombo substation which disrupted supply to parts of the Ashanti and central regions, according to internal sector briefings seen by NorvanReports.
Other reported incidents include an underground cable fault around La–Akowah House, faults involving transformers in Mpatado (Western Region) and the Assin Fosu district, an “upstream” challenge affecting the Eastern Region, as well as additional outages described as linked to maintenance works in the Western Region and an underground fault at Aboso.
While officials have not publicly linked the incidents, the clustering of failures across geographically dispersed nodes of the grid has sharpened speculation in the public sphere, a dynamic the ministry is likely to address in its Monday briefing as it seeks to restore confidence and demonstrate control.
Energy sector analysts say the political risk for the government lies not only in the outages themselves but also in the credibility gap that emerges when consumers are repeatedly given technical explanations without a clear programme for system reliability, asset replacement, and enforcement of operational discipline.
The minister’s decision to move the GRIDCo chief aside suggests that the government intends to treat the Akosombo incident and, by extension, broader reliability questions as an institutional issue rather than a series of isolated faults. It also comes amid reports of a leadership shake-up within the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) in the Ashanti Region, pointing to wider changes within the distribution chain.
The ministry did not immediately provide details of the scope, timeline, or independence of the investigations into the Akosombo fire incident, nor whether the CEO’s stepping aside is administrative or forms part of a broader reform package.
Monday’s briefing is expected to outline the government’s diagnosis of the recent disruptions, immediate stabilisation steps, and whether further personnel or governance measures will follow.
