Sierra Leon Veep tours GRIDCO

The Vice President of Sierra Leone, Dr Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, on Monday, toured some operational areas of the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCO).

He was accompanied by the Sierra Leonean Minister for Energy, Alhaji Kanja Sesay, Sierra Leonean High Commissioner to Ghana, Mrs Frances Anderson, and other delegates, on the tour which formed part of his two-day official visit to Ghana.

They first visited the headquarters of GRIDCO where they were welcomed by the Board Chairman of GRIDCO, Ambassador Kabral Blay Amihere, then ushered into a meeting in which personnel explained GRIDCO’s operations to the delegation.

Dr Jalloh and his entourage were later conducted round the GRIDCO system control Centre from where the country’s entire electricity generation, distribution and governance are managed in real-time.

In an address, Ambassador Blay Amihere recalled that the visit was the second by a very high representative of the State of Sierra Leone after President Julius Maada Bio’s visit.

Ambassador Blay Amihere expressed the hope that the visit would help strengthen the bilateral relationship between the two nations.

Vice President Jalloh on his part said his visit demonstrated the interest his country had in the excellent operations at GRIDCO. 

He said the purpose of their visit to GRIDCO was to engage colleagues within the electricity generation, distribution and supply chain.

The Vice President said after his government assumed power in 2018, they prioritised the transformation of the energy sector in order to open up the country, attract foreign direct investment and bolster the productive sector.

Dr Jalloh said in line with that objective, they had been investing enormously in the energy sector, increasing energy output from 16 per cent to 31 per cent within three years.

He said as a result of the improvement, they had successively passed the scorecard of the Millennium challenge and were eligible for a power compact in 2020.

Dr Jalloh said they had, therefore, come to learn best practices, share experiences with their Ghanaian colleagues as they were in the second power compact and had therefore overcome many challenges along the way.

“We are here to get a deeper insight into the work of GRIDCO and build a collaboration that will help us in our drive to build the energy sector,” he said.

He said Sierra Leone had three challenges in the energy sector, namely; generation, transmission and distribution and the governance sector.

Dr Jalloh said his delegation had already had fruitful discussions with Millennium Development Authority, senior colleagues of the Ministry of Energy and Electricity Company of Ghana Limited.

The Chief Execute Officer of GRIDCO, Mr Ebenezer Essienyi, said the personnel from GRIDCO were grateful to share experiences with their counterparts from Sierra Leone and guide them in order to avoid mistakes so that they could acquire the know how to plan, undertake maintenance, among other things.

He said with respect to the compact, GRIDCO was lucky to have received a major grant component to successfully construct two big substations.

The Director for Systems Operation at GRIDCO, Mr Mark Baah, later conducted the delegation round the system control centre where they had an eye view of Ghana’s power generation and distribution network in real time.

FROM GODFRED BLAY GIBBAH, TEMA