Don’t judge our maintenance culture with obsolete equipment – ECG

Director of Communications at the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), William Boateng, has insisted that his outfit has one of the best maintenance schedules in the country.

William who was surprised by claims of a section of the public that the ECG has a poor maintenance culture asked, “What specifics does the public use to assess our maintenance culture to make these comments?”

According to him, the ECG has scheduled maintenance programs which are undertaken on a regular basis to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in power distribution. “We have timetables with which our district and sub station transmission teams work with to ensure maintenance is done on our lines and substations regularly”.

He disclosed that sometimes Ghanaians accuse the ECG of poor maintenance because “of our obsolete equipment”.

Although the ECG has a number of obsolete equipment which need to be replaced, they do not have the funds presently to do so.

“Admittedly, we have obsolete equipment we need to replace but because we don’t have the funds to do so presently, we can’t take them off the system as they will only give us problems. We will still have to use an old transformer which needs to be changed because it is functional”, he told Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show.

Likening these obsolete equipment to phones being upgraded on a regular basis to offer more flexibility, the ECG Director of Communications said, “I may not have the funds to replace my old phone to the latest edition but so far as it performs all the basic and critical functions, I can keep using it until I have enough money to replace it and that is the same thing with our equipment”.

With Ghana being a developing nation, William advised the citizenry to not assume “we have the money to replace our old systems. We will keep using and maintaining our old systems which work until we have enough to replace them”.

There have been stories of what maintenance culture means to Ghanaians. Many argue maintenance culture is very alien to us as a people.

Successive governments and key stakeholders have spoken to this very topic at various levels without a firm grip of solutions for the unwanted deterioration of infrastructure in the built environment.

But with many Ghanaians and private institutions using cars for very long periods and machines past their ‘expiry dates’, it proves one thing, that Ghanaians can maintain really old equipment and make effective and efficient use of them.