Electricity Commission Finding It Tough Going But...

Mr. Fred Asante, Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), has said since the introduction of the new tariff , the company was not able to pay for the cost of power bought from the Volta River Authority (VRA).

He said at the end of February this year, the ECG was owing the VRA to the tune of 799 billion cedis, while the public's indebtedness to ECG stood at 899 billion cedis and called on all hands on deck to find solutions to the problems facing the company.

Mr. Asante, who was speaking at the opening of the fifth biennial congress of the ECG Ladies Association Club (Power Queens of ECG) held at Keta in the Volta Region, said before the introduction of the new tariff, the ECG was able to pay the VRA regularly.

The four-day congress was under the theme, Waste Management in ECG -The Role of Power Queens.

He stressed the need for the workers to have attitudinal change towards work, adding that, "we can put in place all modern and state of the art communication and information technology systems but these may not yield much if there is no attitudinal change on our part".

Mr. Asante urged them to be punctual and be prepared to go the extra mile to help the customers in honouring their payments to the company.

"Our acts of omission such as delay in updating the customer account could defeat the purpose of investing in information technology solutions. These are the fundamental issues that we need to address if we are to salvage the image of the company," he said.

He announced that the company is embarking on a number of projects to enable it meet the needs of its customers.

Among these was the installation of a SCADA, which would enable the company to detect faults early and at a distance and to send fault men straight to the location of the fault

The system, he said, would for a start be limited to some parts of Accra and Tema due to financial constraints.

Mr. Asante said the ECG is also establishing a Wide Area Network to interconnect all regions and districts so that reconciliation and billing problems could be rectified at the district levels to avoid where customers have to travel long distances to the regional offices to have error resolved.

Mrs. Amerley Awua Asamoa, National President of the Association, said in most organisations in Ghana of which ECG was no exception, a lot of resources, be it human or material, go down the drain with devastating losses to such organisations and the country as a whole. She said the theme therefore, seeks to address the problem of waste in the ECG and what the ladies could do, if not to eliminate altogether, curtail considerably the level of waste in the system.

Mrs. Asamoa called for a new ECG where total waste is to become history and a thing of the past, adding, "ECG will go a long way if we are able to tackle and eliminate all dimensions of waste from the company. Day in and day out ECG is accused of mismanagement and we as ladies are of the view that it is overdue for staff in the company to come out with strategies to assist Management to eliminate waste in our dear company."

Mr. Christian Sowah Tetteh, the Director of Finance, said every month ECG bills over 200 billion cedis but only 73 per cent of the bills are collected and urged the staff to increase their efforts in revenue collection to enable the company meet its demand.

He appealed to the cashiers, who are mainly women, to be more vigilant on the job to curb the situation of fraud, under-invoicing and over-invoicing that are likely to cost financial loss to the company.

The Power Queens also used the occasion to launch a HIV/AIDS programme at workplaces to educate people on how to avoid contracting the disease.