Dumsor

In Ghana, dumsor (dum sɔ 'off and on') is a persistent, irregular, and unpredictable electric power outage. The frequent Ghanaian blackouts are caused by power supply shortage. Ghanaian generating capacity by 2015 was 400-600 megawatts, less than Ghana needed. Ghanaian electricity distributors regularly shed load with rolling blackouts. At the beginning of 2015, the dumsor schedule went from 24 hours with light and 12 without to 12 hours with light and 24 without. The long blackouts contrast with the practice in other countries, where blackouts roll rapidly so that no residential area is without power for more than one hour at a time. The re-introduction of dumsor in 2019 without publishing the requisite load shedding schedule came along with the term dumsaa meaning off for a considerably long time or off all the time. The term is derived from two separate words from the Asante Twi, the Akuapem Twi or Fante dialects of the Akan language, dum ('to turn off or quench') and sɔ ('to turn on or to kindle'), and so the term roughly translates as "off-and-on". The term has also recently evolved into dum dum: sɔ no mma ('off and off') because of the increase in the intensity of the power outages. In 2018, a new term was coined by the energy minister who referred to the dumsor as , as compared to the intermittent power outages now dum so, as the country faces outages. By early 2019, Ghanaians began to experience another wave of a controversial dumsor or load shedding, whose schedule was not published, despite the norm. Ghana's Parliament was even divided on how to call it. This thus ushered in the term : supposedly, a superlative form of dumsor. While officials of Ghana's energy sector regulators claimed that dumsaa, the new wave of dumsor, was due to transmission failures, sector analysts believed dumsaa was a matter of gross corporate liquidity mismanagement. Ghana's power supply became erratic in early 2001. There was reduced generation capacity, due to a significant drop in water levels at the Akosombo Dam (Ghana's main hydro-electric dam).