Dr Kwabena Donkor is one hell of a ballsy minister. Of all the ministers, his portfolio has had the worst year, with the never ending power crisis. And of all the ministers, he is also the only one who has promised to resign by the end of they year if his sector’s issues are not fixed.

Yet, Honourable Dzifa Attivor has somehow lost her job, and Kwabena Donkor is set to have a job into the new year. It’s not because he fixed the dumsor, but because he is trying a trick of lexicon to wiggle out of his very clear promise.

He first mentioned this ‘trick’ last month when questions started being raised about whether he would resign or not at the end of the year. His explanation was that he promised to end load shedding and not dumsor.

Whilst a lot of Ghanaians thought the supposed distinction nonsensical, Dr Donkor is sticking to his guns. Appearing before the Parliamentary Assurances Committee on Wednesday, the minister explained his stance, saying that dumsor as a term does not reflect, and what we are suffering from is load shedding or power rationing.

“I have been at pains at several places to make a critical distinction that the new lexicon, ‘dumsor’, does not reflect. Load shedding arises out of generation deficit. In ordinary language we would say power rationing, because we don’t have enough. That is what I promised on the floor of the House to work towards its cessation,”

In other words, you cannot really expect him to put an end to a problem that does not exist. He also added that ‘technically’, load shedding should be over before the end of the year, whilst leaving the obvious caveat of what might happen in case of unexpected problems arising.

“In terms of all mechanical things, you will plan, put in place measure to ensure delivery. But normally in project management, you will have some allowance to make room for slippage and add or take away two weeks. Technically by the end of the year, load shedding should be over but the caveat is that barring any unforeseen circumstances.

“For example the FPSO Nkrumah, which supplies gas to the Atuabo Gas processing plant, should it trip, it would mean that we would lose about 630 megawatts of power in the Aboadze corridor. It has had a number of trips in the last six months.”