Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, according to Citinewsroom.com has disclosed that officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) sabotaged the government’s efforts to digitalise revenue collection.
Speaking at the Annual AGM of Anti-corruption Agencies in Africa, Dr Bawumia reportedly stated that some staff of the IT unit at ECG introduced ransomware to prevent the system from working properly.
According to him, the ransomware collapsed the system, adding that it took the intervention of National Security to discover the staff behind the sabotage.
“They just kept it at GHC450 million every month. So, I said we need to send in a team to digitalise the new collection of the Electricity Company of Ghana, so we sent in a team and we began the process to digitalise.
“Can you believe that workers within the system sabotaged it, they put ransomware into the whole system and the system essentially collapsed. We had to send in National Security to eventually find that it was some of the staff at the IT department who were culpable.
“And we found the computer, which the ransomware was injected in the system. It took us awhile to restore the system. They asked for a ransom to actually allow for this to work. Can you imagine? That we should pay, they submitted a bill that we should pay for the system to work.
“Anyway, they were arrested. And we restored the system and we digitised the system and we said that no more cash payments for electricity in Ghana. You only pay by your mobile money, electronic bank transfers. So that is now the case. Can you believe that from GHC450 million a month, collections have now gone to over a billion cedis a month,” Veep Bawumia was quoted as saying.
The Chronicle finds this revelation very very frightening and we are happy that the ECG ICT staff behind the crime, according Dr Bawumia, have been arrested. Unfortunately, the vice president did not go into the details of this arrest and whether the suspect(s) have been put before court or not.
In our opinion, if the suspects have not been put before court, the Attorney General should fast track the process and ensure that they have faced the full rigours of the law.
When Dr Bawumia began this digitisation agenda, many people did not understand him. And as we noted in this column some time ago, his political opponents were even making fun of it.
Fortunately for us, we are all beginning to see how the process is benefitting the country. Indeed, when the digitisation began, five hundred and thirty-three people on the Controller and Accountant-Generals Department (CAGD) payroll database were found to have multiple identities.
In addition, 148,060 out of the about 601,000 employees on the database did not match any of the names on the national identification register, the Ghana Card database. The same digitisation led to the discovery of 14,027 ghost names on the payroll of the National Service Secretariat.
When these illegal names were removed, it saved the nation GH¢120 million in 2022. In the case of the CAGD, The Chronicle understands that millions of cedis were saved after all the ghost names had been removed.
Also, but for the intervention of digitisation, all the huge sums of money Veep Bawumia is talking about (approximately GHS500m) would have gone into individual pockets at the ICT department of the ECG.
Regrettably, these people, after using their technological knowledge to steal from the state, will turn round to accuse the government of running down the economy. As we put this piece together, one US Dollar is equal to a whopping GHS14.00. Yet people are stashing thousands and millions of dollars in their bedrooms.
These people are behaving like the proverbial Akan bird, which usually goes up stream to ruffle the water and then comes down stream to ask who polluted the same water.
In a nutshell, we are our own enemies, but we are refusing to accept this bare fact. Nevertheless, we encourage Dr Bawumia to keep on pursuing the digitisation agenda because it has enormous benefits for the country. Majority of the citizens are not appreciating it because it is an intangible product, but the educated ones know its benefits.
It is upon the basis of this that we are reiterating our call on both ECG management and Attorney General to ensure that those behind the ‘kuluulu’ at the ITC department have indeed been brought to book, even though the stealing syndicate has been busted.
