The Member of Parliament for Bongo, Edward Abambire Bawa, has justified why the Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Masubir Mahama, should be dismissed from his office.
Edward Bawa says for lying to the entire public over the cause of the power outages, Mr. Dubik Mahama, should not continue to manage the affairs of the power distribution company.
On TV3’s KeyPoints Saturday, April 20, 2024, the Member on Parliament’s Mines and Energy Committee intimated that for Mr. Mahama to sign a statement explaining to the public that its inability to adequately supply power to the state stems from some faulty transformers which turned out to be false, is enough grounds to get him out of office.
He asserts all the speculations that were made against the ECG’s inability to provide power have been proven true.
“All the things we were saying have been proven right. We had indicated that from August up till February, all the revenue that ECG collected, they never put in the Priceaterfall Mechanism. Two, it has been established that ECG looked into the eyes of Ghanaians and lied. The lie is that, when we were having the load-shedding, ECG issued a statement saying that the reason for the outages in the country between 7pm and 11pm was as a result of the fact that they were replacing 630 of their transformers.
“It is on the stretch of that that the PURC then asked them to; give us the GPS locations of these ones, give us the ratings of those transformers in order to know if they are overloaded or not. So from their findings, only 89, not even 100 [were faulty and being replaced] so ECG lied to the public under the signature of their Managing Director. That alone, in my opinion, should be a reason why that man should not be in the office today,” he told host, Alfred Ocansey.
The ECG and the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) have been having issues recently regarding an ongoing load-shedding which is known locally as ‘dumsor’. The Commission, whose responsibility it is, to seek the interest of consumers in ensuring that they given the best of services by public utilities, asked the Company to provide a timetable to guide the public on their dumsor schedule.
But, the ECG refused, indicating that the power outages were as a result of some planned maintenance which occurred as a result of some faulty transformers that were being replaced. The PURC fined the Board of Directors of the ECG GHC5.8million for failing to provide the timetable. Meanwhile, the Board says the fine is illegal since the PURC does not weird that mandate to fine it.
