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The management of Pozzolana Cement Plant is considering embarking on redundancy exercise or shutting down the company temporarily, following the adverse effects of power outages on the operations of the local firm.

Production Manager for the company, Collins Opoku Gyan, said the company could not continue paying salaries of workers at a time it is not making profits due to the unstable power supply.

He told local television station, TV3 on Sunday July 17 that: “We have workers that we have employed and paying them, if there is no light, we can’t work. We have to pay them too, so it is costing the company a lot. If nothing is being done about it, the best thing is that we have to sack the workers, close the company so that we will have our peace.”

Mr Yaw Peprah, Commercial Manager of the company, also said: “The electricity situation is very bad at the moment, we pay GHS25,000 a month to the electricity company of Ghana for the energy that we use. Unfortunately, the supply is not stable, when we are doing the test and the electricity goes off, the whole test gets spoilt because we have to restart it all over.”

Meanwhile, government has blamed the power situation on Nigeria’s inability to supply crude oil to Ghana.

Deputy Power Minister John Jinapor explained that vandalism at oil production sites in Nigeria has disrupted production, which is affecting Ghana.

“We are having some problems with even crude supply that we have paid for [Nigeria] they have not been able to deliver the crude,” he said.