The Electricity Company of Ghana’s (ECG) vision to transport all metres in the country from post-paid to prepaid has not materialised after decades of commencement because the Company has not been capitalised since 2007.
The Managing Director of the ECG, Samuel Dubik Mahama, who made the disclosure on TV3’s Hot Issues Sunday, September 08, 2024, indicated that the Company, has since adopted its own means to achieve that dream.
According to him, because government has failed to give the ECG the needed funds to embark on its reforms, it is using its operational expenditure to close the gaps.
When he said the “ECG is a company that has not been capitalized since 2007”, he explained that, “let’s say, for example, when prepaid metering started, government’s plan was to look for some huge capital money for us to replace all meters to prepaid and then declare their postpaid meters obsolete. Guess what? It was truncated at some point.”
“So as we speak, we have 50% of our meters postpaid, the other 50 are prepaid. So until there’s a vigorous or a deliberate attempt to make sure that the whole country is prepaid, you know, whenever you talk, everybody’s going like, the easiest way is just buy them prepaid meters. Where do we get the money from?”
He added that “all these new reforms that you’ve been seeing for the past two years since I’ve been in office have been us trying to be creative in using our operational expenditure to close the gaps.”
He explained that there needs to be a conversation over the issue since the reforms are capital intensive and cannot be solely borne by the Company.
“So we all we do need is a conversation around the whole table saying that, hey, you cannot be doing this anymore. This is the capital expenditure that needs to be put in. Value this, value that. And let’s talk around the big table to find that kind of money to solve some of these technical issues.
“It’s either we better our collections and use that money to replace those meters or there’s a capitalization conversation around the table where a proper financial plan is drawn, aimed at what deliberately attacking the metering phenomenon,” he maintained.
