The Member of Parliament for Tolon, Habib Iddrisu, has dismissed the 24-hour economy policy proposed by the National Democratic Congress (NDC), describing it as a joke and a mockery of themselves. According to him, the NDC could not even run the economy for 12 hours when they were in office due to the constant power outages that crippled businesses and caused unemployment.
The 24-hour economy is a major policy proposal by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) going into the 2024 general elections. In explaining the policy, the flagbearer of the party, John Dramani Mahama, noted that the policy, when implemented, would allow businesses to run 24-hours a day, around the clock.
This, he added, would rake in more revenues and also generate jobs for the unemployed youth in the country.
However, the Deputy Majority Whip, Habib Iddrisu, in an interview with GHOne TV, said that the NDC’s policy is unrealistic. “Sometimes, when they are talking about how they will run a 24-hour economy, I just laugh at them. How can you run a 24- hour economy when you can’t even keep running the economy for 12 hours?” he questioned.
The MP further explained that the NDC’s mismanagement of the energy sector led to the infamous ‘dumsor’ crisis, which affected many small-scale businesses and factories.
“People with small-scale businesses and factories were being shut down because of the constant power outages we refer to as ‘dumsor.’ Businesses have collapsed, and people have lost their jobs, so you can’t run the economy for 12 hours; how can you run it for 24 hours? We need electricity to be part of the sectors in the economy to be able to run any 24-hour economy that we want to do.
They are only making a mockery of themselves,” he stated. Addressing the current intermittent power outages, the MP stated that the situation was not comparable to the dumsor era and that the government has been working to fix the problem.
To him, the sector is only maintaining some of the power lines across the country, and that has resulted in what appears to be dumsor.
“What is currently happening is not dumsor. The Minister of Energy came to the House to brief us and said that there were some kind of problems with some of the power lines and they were going to do some repairs as a result, some parts of the country will experience power outages. But we cannot say that Ghana is experiencing dumsor. This is not the era of the Mahama administration,” he added.
