Lessons from ECG’s debt retrieval exercise

Tomorrow, Thursday April 20, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) will end its month-long special revenue mobilisation exercise it embarked on to recover some GH¢5.7 billion owed it by its customers.

During the period, it closed its administrative offices nationwide and deployed its staff to the field to go round to retrieve the debt, with only technical, customer care and operational offices at work.

The exercise, which received the backing of the government, particularly the President, the Vice-President and the Ministry of Energy, has seen the ECG recover almost GH¢2.6 billion, according to its Managing Director, Samuel Dubik Mahama.

That is almost 50 per cent of the amount in debt.

Although the ECG has not been able to achieve its targeted 100 per cent recovery, the exercise can be described as successful and the Daily Graphic commends the company for this recovery exercise.

However, the question that begs for an answer is: Why did the company wait till the debt had reached this astronomical level before deciding to act?

Electricity is a basic right and it is also an essential commodity, as it plays a significant role in our everyday lives, as well as in businesses, be they service, production or manufacturing.

We recall times past when getting regular supply of power was a challenge in this country.

In fact, the last power crisis in 2015 was so severe that the country was compelled to embark on a power rationing exercise that had since become a household name termed ‘dumsor’.

Every Ghanaian citizen at the time was a witness to the impact the situation had on the economy.

It affected everybody: families, businesses, hospitals, universities, factories, shopping malls, the private sector and the public sector.

Undoubtedly, productivity slackened and unemployment surged

Thankfully, that situation has greatly improved.

It is thus unacceptable that customers will consume power and fail to pay for it, giving all kinds of excuses.

Curiously, the bulk of the indebtedness to the ECG is owed by businesses and institutions.

It is unthinkable how a business will refuse to pay for power it has used and still expects the power generator to continue to produce power for the business to use for production.

The fact that debtors were able to get the money to either pay or defray part of their indebtedness shows that it was intentional on the part of consumers. It shows that they do not prioritise the payment of their electricity bills.

The debt owed ECG does not affect only the power distributor but also the entire power production and supply chain, as the ECG also owes independent power producers (IPPs). Indeed, the IPPs had threatened to shut down thier plants as a viable option if an amount of $1 billion owed them was not settled.

It is important for us a nation and especially stakeholders to take some key lessons from this ECG experience to serve as a guide: that as a business, there is always the need to be proactive and not wait for issues to get out of hand before deploying drastic emergency measures to resolve problems that consistent action would have taken care of.

The exercise has brought to the fore other issues, such as illegal connections and power theft that also affect the operations of the ECG. If the ECG had been more proactive, this would have been detected long ago.

This must be a lesson to Ghana Water Company Limited and the Northern Electricity Development Company.

They must make collection of tarrifs a priority.

Also, the point needs to be made that businesses must consider power which is an essential commodity as an operational expense and make budgetary allocations for it, just as it is done for other materials for production, knowing that without power, no work can be done and no production can take place.

Importantly, power consumers must stop the habit of putting off the payment of bills to a later date, only to realise that the bills have piled up and become huge debts that are difficult to defray.

The Daily Graphic believes that power plays an important and integral role in the nation’s socio-economic development and so it is important for all stakeholders to live up to their responsibilities to ensure that there is efficient power supply to drive this agenda.