ECG to clamp down on illegal consumers August 1

Source: Daily Graphic Ghana - The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) will, from Saturday, August 1, 2015, commence a special national exercise aimed at clamping down on people who have connected power illegally. 

The exercise, which will be carried out in collaboration with the military and the police, will involve visits to all customers of the company to ascertain the nature of their electricity connection and the state of electricity meters.

Announcing the exercise at a press conference in Accra yesterday, the Managing Director of the company, Mr Robert Dwamena, said the move had been occasioned by the wanton theft of power on the part of some unscrupulous elements who undermined the revenue drive of the company.

He said in spite of the existence of loss control outfits in the ECG, the theft of power was becoming overwhelmingly high.

The decision to embark on the exercise, Mr Dwamena said, followed a pilot exercise carried out at Dodowa where it was realised that out of the 591 customers of the company in the area, 110 of them had connected power illegally.

Those found culpable, he said, had been surcharged and GH¢100,000 was to be retrieved, after which they would be prosecuted.

He said after the exercise, a monitoring team would be deployed to ensure that those found culpable did not go back to repeat same.

“We want to be more aggressive. We want to ensure that our own staff do not get involved in encouraging those illegalities,” he said.

As part of efforts to curb the theft of power, he said, new prepaid meters had been introduced into the system with features that prevented leakage.

He said the meters that were initially supplied to customers lacked the features that made then non-susceptible to manipulation but the new ones would be impossible to tamper with.

Mr Dwamena also announced that the ECG was introducing a data logger equipment that would be used to read customers’ postpaid meters.

He said system losses by the company currently stood at 23.5 per cent and expressed the hope that with the exercise about to be undertaken, it would be reduced to 21 per cent by the end of this year and hopefully 15 per cent by the end of 2016.