Ghana's energy sector is bleeding money at a scale most Ghanaians do not fully appreciate — and the people paying the price often do not even have electricity at home.
That is the stark warning from Ben Boakye, Executive Director of the African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), who spoke on JoyNews' Newsfile on Saturday, September 12. Boakye argued that the country's persistent energy sector inefficiencies are not only draining public finances but actively deepening inequality among citizens.
The Real Numbers Behind the Crisis
Government expenditure reports often highlight around GH¢3.5 billion in annual energy sector spending — a figure Boakye says is dangerously misleading. The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) alone, he pointed out, records losses exceeding GH¢20 billion every year, with those losses ultimately absorbed by the national budget.
Even that GH¢20 billion understates the full picture, according to Boakye. Ghana has increasingly turned to domestic bond markets — sometimes borrowing at interest rates above 20 per cent — and has also issued Eurobonds, with portions of those funds going toward settling debts owed to independent power producers (IPPs) and covering fuel costs for electricity generation.
"The country already knows the fundamental problems affecting the sector," Boakye said, urging a shift in focus from financing the consequences of dysfunction to actually fixing the underlying causes.
Who Pays — And Who Benefits?
For Boakye, the deeper injustice is not just financial. Ordinary Ghanaians are effectively funding the servicing and amortisation of energy sector debts through public finances — yet a significant portion of those same citizens have no access to electricity.
This makes the crisis, in his framing, not simply a budget question but a question of fairness: who bears the cost, and who actually benefits from the system? Continuing to pile up debt to sustain an inefficient infrastructure creates a cycle where taxpayers shoulder an ever-growing burden without receiving meaningful improvements in electricity services.
Boakye described the situation as an existential threat to the national budget — one Ghana is failing to confront with the seriousness it deserves. The broader conversation around technology and efficiency in Africa's infrastructure makes the sector's resistance to modernisation even harder to justify.
Reform Debate Heats Up
Boakye's comments arrive at a particularly sensitive moment. Proposed reforms to ECG have triggered pushback from organised labour, with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) threatening action and the Public Utilities Workers' Union (PUWU) raising formal concerns with the World Bank.
The tensions reflect how politically charged energy reform remains in Ghana — but Boakye's position is clear. Debating reform while ignoring the scale of waste is not a neutral choice; it is a decision to keep transferring billions in losses onto the public purse year after year.
For a country still navigating post-debt restructuring recovery, the arithmetic is unforgiving. At GH¢40 billion a year, the energy sector's inefficiency is not a sector problem anymore — it is a national one. Tracking reforms at ECG will be essential reading for anyone watching Ghana's fiscal recovery, and this story connects directly to the broader conversation around infrastructure accountability across the continent.