Samuel Dubik Masubir Mahama, Managing Director (MD) of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), says he does not feel sabotage by the massive system shutdown that hit the company last week.
Blaming the hitch on purely internet failure, resulting in millions of customers on prepaid meters in most parts of its operational areas having difficulty in buying credits, Mr. Mahama said the IT technicians of the company had been able to restore the system as of yesterday.
“The restoration started with our district offices, and then our third parties. We hope that by the close of the day, we will have finished increasing the security levels on the ECG App for all of our customers.
“So, I must say that except for the Ashanti Region, where we still have some numbers to restore, I am glad to say that most of our vending stations and district offices are up and running now, and our customers can now go and buy credit,” Samuel D.B. Mahama told a section of the media at a brief conference in Accra yesterday.
Accepting blame for the hitches and apologising to all of ECG customers for the inconveniences they had to endure, Mr. Mahama said over 95 per cent of the customers were active on their systems as of the time of meeting the media.
He advised anybody who, given the situation, illegally tapped electricity to their homes to disconnect, warning, “We will be resuming our routine illegal connections inspections of homes and structures soon, and ECG won’t spare anybody caught in the act.”
He went on to encourage customers to use the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) redress channel in case they had recorded losses as a result of the hitch.
“On how much the ECG has lost, in terms of revenue, we can only know that after investigations have been concluded,” he noted.
From last week Tuesday to Friday, thousands of ECG customers whose prepaid meters ran out of credit could not reload their meters as a result of a prolonged system shutdown.
These customers had to sleep in the dark throughout the period, with some allegedly stealing power via illegal connections.
ECG resumed some sales on Saturday, Sunday and Monday at its district offices where hundreds of its customers queued to buy credits to reload their meters, after an announcement that the system had begun restored.
