Sale of CMS shares was publicly announced two months ago!

President Kufuor has not yet recovered from his monumental gaffe in announcing in his ‘State of the Nation’ Address on 8th February 2007 that Ghana will be receiving 200 megawatts of power from Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire within a fortnight of his speech before walking into another energy mess.

The President’s advisers had either not told him, or he himself had not understood, that there was no electricity inter-connectivity between the Nigeria grid and the Benin- Togo-Ghana grid and that even if Nigeria had the power to supply, there would be no transmission liners to carry it.

Since that embarrassing faux pas, Andrew Awuni the Presidential Press Secretary, Joshua Ofedie the VRA Chief Executive and Joseph Adda the Minister of Energy himself, have all tried without success to salvage some dignity and respect for the President.

Now matters are worse. From nowhere, President Kufuor waded into the affairs of CMS and TICO (Takoradi International Company), the Company that co-owns the Aboadze Thermal Plant with the VRA. The President chided and chastised the management for off loading its shares in TICO without advertisement and without notice to the Government or the VRA.

The President could not have been more wrong. It turns out that as far back as February 6, 2007, two days before the President read his ill-fated "State of the Nation" Address, CMS had advertised publicly the sale of its shares in TICO and other of its interests in companies around the world.

A simple reading of CMS Energy Form 8-K and 10-K would have availed the public information to President Kufuor and his advisers.

The advertisement on the Internet read as follows:

JACKSON, Mich., Feb. 6, 2007
CMS ENERGY ANNOUNCES SALE OF OWNERSHIP INTERESTS IN BUSINESSES IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND INDIA
http://ww.answers. Com/topic/cms-energy-corporation
CMS ENERGY CORP (Form: 8-K, Received: 02/06/2007 08:57:39)

"The other businesses included in the sale are CMS Energy’s ownership interests in the Jorf Lasfar Energy Company in Morocco, the Jubail Energy Company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Takoradi International Company in Ghana, and the ST CMS Company in Neyveli, India. The sale doesn’t include the company’s non-utility North American electric generating plants."

We ask again: what is wrong with President Kufuor’s advisors? Are his energy experts not supposed to track the dealings of energy companies in which the Government has shares and which are of strategic importance to Ghana?

What about the Bank of Ghana? It claims that energy is one of the most important economic indicators that they watch. Did they watch the CMS Energy shares and other indicators? So how did it happen that President Kufuor was kept in the dark for nearly two months only to open his mouth in the most embarrassing manner by claiming that CMS Energy had sold its shares clandestinely?

Another faux pas by President Kufuor.
Another damage control exercise for the troika of Messrs Andrew Awuni, Joshua Ofedie and Joseph Adda.
Will they succeed with CMS Energy, when they could not convince even their own supporters in Ghana with the Nigeria power supply goof?
Time will tell.