ACCRA, (Reuters) – Ghana’s state-run electricity supplier, ECG, briefly cut off power supplies to the parliament building on Thursday in an effort to push the legislature to honour its 23 million Ghanaian cedi ($1.8 million) debt, an ECG spokesperson said.
A video shared by local media showed lawmakers exclaiming in the dark parliamentary chamber after the power was shut off, eventually joining together in a chant of “dumsor, dumsor” – black-out in the local Twi language.
ECG has decided to cut power after the legislature failed to “honour demand no-tices to pay up,” ECG’s communications director William Boateng told Reuters.
Soon after, “they paid 13 million cedi ($1 million) and promised to pay the rest in a week, so our guys reconnected them.”
A parliament spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
The strong-arm tactics come as the West African country’s power sector grapples with widespread unpaid debts that have led to a sharp increase in outages amid a standoff between power producers and the government.
Boateng said cutting the parliament’s electricity was part of ECG’s usual strategy to encourage indebted customers to pay up.
