Samuel Dubik Mahama
The Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Mahama, has disclosed that the company has recovered GH¢3.1 billion out of the GH¢5.7 debt owed by its customers across the nation.
This followed a one-month revenue mobilisation exercise embarked on by the company which focused on all categories of customers in arrears including State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs).
He, however, revealed that there is still over GH¢1 billion to be recovered although he indicated that it will difficult to do so giving the circumstances under which those debts were incurred.
He said some of the debtors include companies that have collapsed and have left the scene with no recourse to ECG and have accumulated a debt of about GH¢780 million while another group of customers made up of post-paid customers some of whom have moved on as a result of demolitions an flooding have also accumulated a debt of about GH¢750 million.
“So we are still going to do our best to sustain this exercise and we are going to make sure that the last week of every month will be a revenue mobilisation exercise. In the last week of every month we would also do a ‘Know Your Customer’ drive make sure that all customers we do not know or know of are captured or put in our books so that everybody pays what they have to pay,” Mr. Mahama said.
He indicated that the company’s revenue assurance team will always make sure that bills are sent out promptly in the case of post-paid customers and the company is currently developing a billing system that will also check the readings of pre-paid metres.
He also disclosed that as part of measures to address metre shortages, the company is rolling out a flat rate service after a proper estimation is done in order to eliminate the issue of illegal connection until customers are provided with their own metres.
Mr. Mahama announced another moratorium and encouraged people consuming electricity without recourse to ECG to visit any of its offices to have their consumptions captured to avoid being arrested and prosecuted.
“You cannot consume power for free. There is a huge gap that we have to close in the energy sector and we have come up with a strategy to collect whatever until such a time that you will be able to have your own metre,” he stated
Mr. Mahama added that “Our Power App is still going through an enhancement, we are receiving traffic. I must admit we’ve been having some internet problems from our internet providers and we are working hard to switch to a better one or add on to it so that our service becomes dynamic.”
BY Gibril Abdul Razak