The Western Regional Communications Officer of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Ben Quarcoe, has disclosed that the company is not in loss but in deficit.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Macall Mensah on the mid-Morning lounge as part of the Worker’s Month celebration, Mr Ben Quarcoe revealed that the Company does not get enough funds to support its operations in order the offer a better service to customers.
He added that the company has been making deficits in a while, thus their proposal for a 148 per cent increase on the power supply to improve on quality of service given to clients
” There is a deficit because, the company doesn’t receive the resources as requested thus making operations ineffective. We have sent a proposal to the PURC for an increment of 148 per cent on tariffs to cushion our operations.
He further said that ECG needs to expand its services to people in some rural areas. As the only energy distribution company in the country, ECG has the mandate to provide the nation with the power to boost productivity.
Mr Quarcoe mentioned that the “government’s support is inadequate to support our operations hence we use the available resources to enhance the smooth running of the company.”
He also associated the current outages with the poor maintenance of some of their machines and equipment used in power distribution.
Explaining further, Mr Ben Quarcoe said, deficits are what they need to improve on service delivery and losses are those things that the company has no control on.
However, the Energy Minister, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has disclosed that the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) loses about $400 million to illegal connections.
Sharing the data at a press conference on Wednesday, the Minister said the amount of money ECG fails to collect is largely made up of its commercial losses and collection losses.
“I mean theft; those who are stealing metres, those who are bypassing their metres, those whose metres are not working, and those who don’t even have metres but also have electricity.”
