Ghana has wired the nation. The next task is to make every installation behind the meter safe, efficient and reliable and the same discipline delivers all three.
Ghana has achieved what most of sub-Saharan Africa still aspires to: electricity access for more than eighty per cent of the population. Villages that cooked by firelight a generation ago now refrigerate medicine, charge phones and run welding shops. It is a genuine national triumph and it casts a shadow we can no longer afford to ignore.
For most of our electrification era there was no nationally accepted, enforceable standard governing safe electrical practice on premises or in network construction. The state built generation; the utilities extended the wires; but what happened after the meter inside the home, the shop, the church, the factory was largely ungoverned territory. Anyone with a screwdriver and confidence could call himself an electrician. Cable was bought on price, not specification. Protection was based on assumption. Earthing was optional folklore. The results are written in our fire statistics, our hospital records, and the flickering, wasteful installations found in too many buildings.
The regulatory turning point
That era of silence ended with the Ghana Electrical Wiring Regulations, 2011 (L.I. 2008), passed by Parliament in February 2012 in response to a spate of devastating electrical fires, with enforcement and public consciousness maturing from around 2013. For the first time, electrical wiring became a legally restricted activity: only Certified Electrical Wiring Professionals (CEWPs), examined and certified by the Energy Commission, may lawfully undertake it, and new installations require certification before connection. L.I. 2008 converted wiring from an informal trade into a regulated profession and converted good practice from a personal ethic into a legal duty.
Yet the law had a structural weakness that those of us in the field observed almost immediately: it regulated the person and the work, but not the materials. The certified electrician stood in the shop confronting shelves of substandard cable conductors with less copper than their markings claimed, accessories of no verifiable provenance often under commercial pressure to buy the cheapest. Parliament closed that loophole with the Electrical Wiring Cables and Electrical Wiring Accessories Regulations, 2023 (L.I. 2478), which extends regulation upstream to manufacturers, importers, wholesalers and retailers. It is now unlawful to trade in wiring products that fail Ghana Standards Authority requirements, with sanctions running from fines and seizure to imprisonment and even the disconnection of non-compliant facilities.
Together, these instruments supported by the broader framework of the Energy Commission Act, PURC quality-of-service benchmarks, utility service codes and the growing energy efficiency regime form the two pillars of a coherent system: competent people installing compliant materials. Neither pillar can carry the load alone. The finest cable badly installed is dangerous; the finest electrician cannot build safety from counterfeit copper.
Safety and efficiency are the same physics
Here is the insight that should reframe our national conversation: electrical hazards and electrical inefficiencies are overwhelmingly the same physical phenomena at different stages of development.
Consider the loose termination the classic finding of every infrared thermographic survey I have conducted across banks, factories, markets and homes. A high-resistance joint carrying load is a small electric heater buried in a distribution board: it wastes paid-for kilowatt-hours every hour of every day while it cooks its own insulation towards ignition. The day it starts a fire is merely the last day of a long career of waste. The undersized or substandard conductor is simultaneously a fire hazard, an energy drain through excess resistive losses, and a voltage-drop defect degrading every appliance it feeds. The unbalanced three-phase installation circulates neutral current that does no work but generates heat; harmonic-rich loads overheat transformers and neutrals alike. Every one of these appears in a power quality audit as both a non-compliance finding against international benchmarks such as EN 50160 and a quantifiable cost on the electricity bill.
Manage the hazard, and you have managed the waste. The safety inspection and the energy audit walk the same route through the same installation, instruments in hand, looking at the same joints, conductors and loads.
This is why adherence to electrical safety is not merely a private virtue for individual owners it is demand-side management conducted by other means. Every megawatt not wasted behind our meters is a megawatt of generation, transmission and distribution capacity the nation does not have to finance, fuel
or maintain. Ghana’s power sector financing pressures and the painful memory of the dumsor years make the arithmetic vivid: the demand side is the cheapest power station we can build, and millions of poorly maintained installations are a silent national tax on capacity. A country that manages electrical safety well wastes less energy, loses fewer buildings and livelihoods to fire, suffers fewer outages, and moves faster towards its Sustainable Development Goal 7 commitments and its climate pledges. Electrical safety management is sustainability management with test instruments.
Reliability is made at both ends of the wire
Public discourse assigns reliability entirely to the utilities. Their role is real and regulated but reliability as actually experienced is co-produced by the customer’s installation. Faults inside premises trip feeders, stress transformers, and export harmonics and unbalance to the neighbors. Poor protective discrimination means a fault on one circuit darkens a whole building. Improvised generator and inverter connections have back-fed “dead” utility lines and endangered line workers. A pristine grid supply is squandered by an installation that cannot distribute it safely.
The compact this implies is simple: the utility owes the customer a supply within declared quality envelopes; the customer owes the network a compliant installation; and the regulator’s opportunity is to formalise both sides of the bargain.
What international best practice teaches us
Ghana’s regulatory framework is now respectable; the gap lies in depth, currency and enforcement. The international mirror shows what completion looks like.
In the United Kingdom, BS 7671 the IET Wiring Regulations, professional lodestar of most Ghanaian practitioners is revised on a rolling cycle, and the law mandates not only initial certification but a culture of periodic inspection, embodied in the Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) and reinforced by landlord licensing and insurance requirements. In the United States, the National Electrical Code is updated every three years, while NFPA 70E governs safe work practices: arc flash assessment, energised work permits, and de energised work as the legal default. Across Europe, the IEC 60364 family governs installations, EN 50160 defines the voltage quality customers may expect, and CE marking performs at continental scale the market-surveillance function that L.I. 2478 is now building here.
Four lessons stand out for adoption “at a discount” lessons other nations paid for in blood and treasure.
First, statutory periodic inspection. Our law certifies installations at birth and then ignores them for the rest of their lives. Enforcement of a mandatory condition report, together with the introduction of in-service inspection and
testing of electrical equipment at defined intervals, phased by risk rented dwellings, public-assembly premises, markets, high-rise buildings is, in my judgment, the single most important pending reform in Ghanaian electrical safety.
Second, a safe-work-practice standard. Ghana’s emerging occupational safety framework should enshrine what NFPA 70E and the UK’s Electricity at Work Regulations already establish: work dead, prove dead, lock out and treat energised work as a narrow, justified, permitted exception, not a display of bravado. Commercial inconvenience is not a recognised exception anywhere in the world.
Third, interlocked enforcement gateways. The cheapest enforcement is the checkpoint already manned: no utility connection without certification; no occupancy permit without an installation certificate; no fire certificate renewal for high-risk premises without a satisfactory condition report; no public procurement award to uncertified contractors. Insurers and lenders should be enlisted as private enforcers, writing these requirements into policies and loan covenants as mature markets do.
Fourth, a completed competency architecture. The informal majority of practitioners cannot be wished away, and mass exclusion would simply drive them underground. Recognition of Prior Learning assessing and certifying demonstrated competence with targeted top-up training is the honourable bridge from informality to certification, alongside structured apprenticeship, specialisation classes in inspection and testing, solar PV and thermography, and continuing professional development, so that the register reflects present competence rather than historical fact.
The road ahead
The renewable transition raises the stakes. Solar PV and electric vehicles are spreading across Ghana’s rooftops and roads, importing an entire new hazard class arrays that energise whenever light falls on them, DC arcs that do not self-extinguish, batteries with stored energy into buildings whose safety regime has barely mastered the old one. EV chargers are being fitted to buildings without any proper assessment of whether the existing installation has the capacity to carry them. Public confidence is the transition’s true fuel: a run of PV and EV fires traced to shoddy installation would set the market back decades, while a transition managed under visible, credible safety governance will finance and accelerate itself.
None of this succeeds without the public. A market that hires on price alone, resists certification “paperwork” and demands live work to avoid closing shop is co-author of every resulting incident. Every client should learn to ask three questions that reprice the market: Are you certified, and in what class? Will I receive a certificate and test results? What protection earthing, residual current devices will I have when you finish? When enough clients ask, the market answers.
Ghana has the laws, and the standards are freely available. What we need now is a generation of professionals hungry for the dignity of their trade. Every fire or electrocution we failed to prevent is tuition already paid. Electrical safety management is how a nation stops paying that tuition twice. The lights are on across Ghana; that is our triumph. The work of our generation is to make certain they are also safe, efficient, reliable and sustainable. That work is a management discipline, it is fully within our competence, and it starts at the next distribution board any of us opens.
By Awal Sakib Mohammed
Technical Director, MS-Plus Ltd · President, Ghana Electrical Contractors Association · Founder, TEEI Ghana
Contact: awalchasant@gmail.com · +233 24 386 4726 · No. 104, Lakeside Business Centre (LBC), Accra, Ghana
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