Atomic Commission shutdowns labs; owes ECG GHC500,000

Ghana Atomic Energy Commission has admitted owing the Electricity Company of Ghana over five hundred thousand Ghana cedis (GHc 500,000).

According to the Commission, the amount was owed before it was rolled onto the prepaid metering system in 2015, which also added to woes of the Commission.

Speaking in an interview with 3FM 92.7 on Monday, February 13, 2017, the Director General of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, Professor Benjamin Nyarko said the situation has put “so much pressure on the IDF [Internally Generated Fund] that we are unable to buy electricity for all the laboratories.”

Consequently, it laboratories have been shutdown, and are periodically opened when the Commission’s internally generated fund is able to support the purchase of electricity credit.

“The agricultural department of the Commission, which produces seedlings for farmers … you see, farmers they don’t have much money and the amount of electricity we buy we cannot get the money from what they sell. So, that’s the most difficult area,” he said.

Professor Benjamin Nyarko said that they have written letters to the previous government to come to their aid but to no avail.

“We wrote to the Ministry of Finance [during former President Mahama’s government] saying that our area is a highly security zone and, therefore, we have to ensure that there is always light so we don’t run into any problem.

“But they said the prepaid [metering] is a government decision [which] they cannot give us postpaid meter. We were thinking that they would give us money, in advance, to buy the electricity but no money came.”

He added that the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission only wants constant supply of electricity, noting that the staff are willingly buying their own electricity to use in their various apartments.