FORGOTTEN NEWS: What happened to the electricity thieves?

In January last year investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas exposed massive corruption at the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and made public the names of companies and government bodies who owed the electricity provider almost GHS400 million.

But what has happened since then? As Ghana struggles with intensified power outages and VRA calls for an increase in tariffs, have the 354 companies and government bodies involved in the scandal paid their bills? And have those at ECG who were caught red-handed in Anas’ exposé been prosecuted, as promised?

President Mills, disturbed by mismanagement at ECG, mandated Anas and his agency to investigate the company even though the investigation revealed that president’s own office owed ECG over GHS675,000.

When Anas’ investigation aired in January 2012, director of customer service at ECG, Dr N K Smart Yeboah, agreed that Anas’ list was accurate and said that he was embarrassed and humiliated by the sheer scale of the corruption.

Some ECG employees, with their official identity tags around their necks, were clearly seen in Anans’ film engaging in illegal meter sales and receiving money from members of the public who were desperate for meters. Enquiries revealed that it can take months to get a meter without paying a bribe for it.

This month it was revealed that government currently owes ECG $500 million in unpaid bills. And barely a month after Anas’ investigation broke last year, it was reported that the company’s board, led by Dr Kwabena Osafo, blew over $250,000 on sitting allowances in 11 months in 2011, further revealing the deep-rooted financial management problems at the company. Ironically, the board which was supposed check the type of financial mismanagement which led to Anas’ investigation, was actually involved in it.

When the scandal broke, head of public relations at ECG, Mrs Gloria Dua-Sakyi, who still holds the same position at ECG, agreed with DR N K Smart Yeboah that the situation was shocking.

GhanaWeb has attempted to contact ECG on many occasions over the past two weeks to get comment on the current power situation and, in particular, to know how far ECG has gotten in prosecuting the officials involved in the corruption and in the collection of the hundreds of millions of cedis of unpaid bills.

We spoke to four different people in the public relations department at ECG’s main office in Accra, some of whom declined to give their last names and refused to comment on this issue, as well as the recent four-day power outage in Adenta which we were investigating at the time. A source hinted that there may have been dismissals in light of the Anas investigation but this could not be confirmed. If there were dismissals, they were not made public.

When the investigation broke, top officials of the ECG told Citi News they would prosecute any official caught in corrupt dealings.

When we asked ECG if we could speak with Mrs Gloria Dua-Sakyi to discuss what actions had been taken by ECG after Anas’ investigation, we were told she was unavailable for comment.

Meanwhile, the country is continuing to suffer from erratic power outages which are set to last until the middle of the year, if not longer. And amid these outages, why is the Volta River Authority (VRA) asking the average person to pay more for unreliable power while government and multi-million-dollar organisations exposed by Anas pay nothing and, a year on, have not been held to account?

Click here to read Anas' original article.